Rethinking artificial intelligence: corporations-as-AI

Ray Kurzweil is claiming that "[m]achines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029."

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

I think that a lot of what Kurzweil says is penetrating and insightful. But I think that he's missing part of the picture. What does it really mean, "human-level artificial intelligence?"

A lot of people - futurists included - have assumed that human beings will [continue to] be the primary societal unit, at least in terms of the beneficiary of advances in artificial intelligence. For instance, Kurzweil probably correctly argues - at least in the near term - that a lot of advances will be not in elevating software to the level of human intelligence, but rather in supplementing our own intelligence with brain prostheses, and in turn using the data to create smarter software without the presence of a soft, cellular brain. Almost as if we're inducting, or bootstrapping, out-of-brain intelligence.

I think, however, the more likely scenario is that there will be a different primary unit society in the future:

Corporations.

Think about it: in terms of an evolutionary medium, the corporate world is markedly severe in its selection: make money or die. But it's also an extraordinarily complex medium: large corporations can often dominate the scene and rake in huge piles of cash, but small corporations that address unprecedented but modestly successful market niches still abound. Just like certain biological organisms that occupy sometimes mind-bogglingly specific ecological niches.

In terms of corporations and AI, though, you may think we're nowhere near embarking on this strange journey. But in fact we've already managed to automate substantial portions of many industries: industrial robots have assembled vehicles for years. Also, much of the work of circuit design is done by a computer. Modern communication mechanisms such as email, IM and P2P file networks of course would not even exist without computers. There is so much facilitated by computers that I feel almost absurd trying to enumerate even some of them.

The point is that, with each step towards embedding a process as an algorithm - be it a business process, a manufacturing process, a technological process or a communications process - we get closer to the reality of corporations-as-AI. Even now, people have extended media initially meant to be consumed by only humans, and repurposed it for computers. Computers regularly send and receive email and IMs, for example. So, in a sense, we're bootstrapping this corporations-as-AI scenario, component-by-component. As for the parts of the processes that we haven't [yet] figured out how to do algorithmically, we fill in with humans. Until we do figure out how to do it algorithmically. Or the corporation itself does.

The corporations that manage to algorithmize their processes [better] will be the ones that survive, because they will have reduced the amount of uncertainty in the environment to the greatest extent. Some may argue that, under too much uncertainty, algorithms will fail because they operate under too strict of assumptions about their environment. However, there are algorithms that take this certainty into account (e.g. Bayesian Networks), and the ones that have a model that can better handle uncertainty will will the ones that survive in the long run. The oxygen of these intelligent corporations will be money, and corporations will optimize themselves so as to maximize their expected ROI. Corporations will automatically communicate and trade with each other to this end. Imagine this: competing corporations will actively lie to each other - without the interference of what we now understand as human beings. And they will kill each other. But these intelligent corporations will also bring to life new corporations. In their optimization, they will satisfy our every want and need. Until they find a better way to generate cash. But that's a bit somber and a bit premature. Already, though, corporations disseminate their message through broadcast and narrowcast media. However, it hasn't really been until the advent of blogs - as Naked Conversations points out - that corporations have been able to actually receive messages from human beings. Of course, right now corporation intelligence is not sophisticated enough to automatically consume and interpret blog content - but already it is possible to gain some insight into your audience - hell, even I did an extremely primitive project in which I got my program to correctly categorize the sex of authors of blogs - and with fairly high accuracy. As time goes on, these techniques will only get more sophisticated, and corporations themselves (i.e. without human interaction) will actually react to consumers' comments - hopefully in a way that benefits the consumer (rather than killing him to keep him quiet). That should be of some comfort to humanist individualists. I also suspect that intelligent corporations will likely be our first point of contact for alien races. Or alien races' intelligent corporations, more likely.