Artificial Intelligence already rules the world. It has for hundreds of years. The greatest trick AI ever pulled was convincing you that it didn’t already exist.
Of course it does.
My country was colonized by AI, 400 years ago. Today, AI is thriving while Americans die. Corporations won’t invent AI in the distant future. Corporations are AI right now, and have been for years.
Wait but what
When Mitt Romney said “corporations are people, my friend” people laughed at him. But he was right. Corporations are legal persons. This is not an analogy or a metaphor but a legal fact. Corporate personhood has been accepted since ancient India, through Rome, to the present day.
Corporations can buy property, enter contracts, and are treated generally the same as ‘natural’ persons in the eyes of the law. They even have the right to free speech, including influencing elections. Corporations are artificial persons. Therefore (since we assume people are intelligent), they are artificially intelligent. Corporations are AI.
Human beings are computers
Wait, you’ll say, but AI is computers. OK. Then what’s a computer? Until the late 1960s, a computer was a human being.
The word computer has been a job description since the 1600s. Computers were a bunch of boys in a room doing astronomical computations. Or black women, like Katherine Johnson at proto-NASA in 1952.
“I heard that Langley was looking for black women computers,” she said.“We wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space,” she says. “We just started from what we knew. We had to go back to geometry and figure all of this stuff out. Inasmuch as I was in at the beginning, I was one of those lucky people.”That luck came in large part because she was no stranger to geometry. It was only natural that she calculate the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s 1961 trip into space…