Corporations Are Already AI

The stock market is sentient and it hates you

indi.ca
7 min readAug 20, 2020

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…

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.