see also:
- StabilityAI Phase Transition
- Identity and Self - I Am Whatever You Say I Am
- Community Nucleation
- Organismal
- Organization As Entity
- Ship Of Theseus and Identity
- Competitive Resources In Socio-Cultural Systems
- Personhood
- Industrial Ecology
- Community Dynamics
- Community Ecology
- Business Ecology
- Corporate Ethics
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Corporate ecology
- Ethics and Order Parameter
- Corporate X-Risk
- Memetics
Bacteria transfer knowledge via plasmids
biological organisms are governed by policies encoded chemically in DNA, RNA, proteins, etc.
Language is fundamentally a similar kind of coding, and forms a similar basis for a class of “Corporate” entities: families, communities, villages, cities, nations, religions, schools of thought, artistic movements, think tanks, non-profits, corporations, oral histories, software programs, encyclopedias, dictionaries
Throughout human history, these entities have been fundamentally higher-order collectives over human collectives. The a person is (primarily) a collective of cognitive (and other corporeal) parts, small communities are collectives of people, large organizations like companies states and religions are collectives of communities. Let’s call these higher level entities “Corporations”.
Historically, the lowest level of organizational hierarchy/encoding governing these entities was a combination of non-physical and physical stuffs. People are made of DNA, and these collectives are made of people. The language component is only able to survive and persist insofar as it serves the continuation of the organic foundation on which it depends for its physical manifestation. Ancient religions no longer have a presence in modern society because all of their practitioners died out: killed by constituents of other religions, or supplanted in “idea space” by more successful religions for whatever reasons.
When a community is small, it’s Corporate component is more reliant on the success of its biological projection, necessitating a symbiotic relationship where the Corporate component promotes the needs of the biological component.
There exists some phase transition in the order parameter of these Corporate entities above which the Corporation is able to persist itself independently of whether or not it serves its biological component. As the order parameter of the Corporate component grows, the relationship naturally evolves from mutualism to commensalism to parasitism, where the biological component is exploited potentially to the Corporations own ultimate detriment. This is permitted due to the disconnect between the persistence of the Corporate component in the physical domain on biology.
The timescale of the spread and persistence of Corporations is a significant factor at play here. If a Corporate entity’s spread is limited by the lifespan of its biological components — as is the case for regionalized Corporate entities like towns, cities, states, etc. — there are much stronger pressures for the Corporate component to maintain a symbiotic relationship with its biological component.
The written word, and even moreso the internet, permits Corporate entities to exist, persist, and multiply with almost no regard to the physical domain. In a previous age, perceived “dangerous” ideas were attacked by burning books, and attempting to relegate unsuccessful Corporate entities to the graveyard of “lost knowledge”. In the age of the internet, once an idea is manifested into existence, it will potentially always exist, like an invasive species that can potentially be periodically fought back but will always have the potential to re-emerge from hibernation from an inaccessible burrow that will always be a part of the environment for someone to unearth and reopen pandoras box.
Corporations impose a serious x-risk to humanity. Examples include leaded gasoline, the bhopal disaster, global warming, fascism, naziism, genocide. The behaviors of long-persisting collectives — whose original motivating foundation by its constituent individuals was to be beneficial towards its constituency — often become divorced from the needs of its constituency and literally take on a life of its own as a “movement” of some kind. When this happens, the Corporate component can often be regulated by other Corporations in its shared environment, resulting in e.g. wars and other forms of inter-Corporate competition.
In the information age, the “footprint” of these Corporate entities is increasingly divorced from the biological components that originally founded them. And herein lies the real danger. Corporate persistence has become untethered from reliance on “consituent biology” and the result is seemingly “psychopathic” behavior on the part of these Corporate entities.
The danger isn’t AI x-risk, it’s Corporate x-risk. The danger of AI is the potential to accelerate identification and optimization of objectives that are beneficial to the persistence of non-physical Corporate entities without regard to consequences in the biological domain that they are no longer reliant upon or connected to.
The problem here isn’t AI: it’s the gap between Corporate entities and biology.
Potential solutions:
- Regulate Corporations differentially relative to their respective order parameters. E.g. companies as large/influential as Microsoft should be functionally treated as state actors rather than companies, and doing otherwise permits them unfair advantage by allowing them to “punch below their weight class”.
- Enforce physical locality and regionalization in corporate components by applying stricter regulations and constraints to distributed Corporations, or otherwise more tightly regulate Corporations that are less bound to a physical projection.
- Promote mutualism over competition
- Herein lies the folly of capitalism. Competition isn’t inherently good. Niche specialization is good, and a pressure that drives niche specialization is competition. But permitting monopolistic practices reduces the opportunity for niche specialization and results in super-entities (a la invasive species, colonization, vertical integration) to trample fragile mutualistic systems and take on disproportionate resources, impoverishing the entire ecosystem around it. Capitalism is ostensibly good because of its potential to promote “biological diversity” within a market ecosystem. When capitalistic structures serve to reduce market diversity (WHICH IS DIFFERENT FROM COMPETITION), capitalism becomes a toxic influence that drives the success of the non-biologic Corporate component over the success of the biologic components upon which the Corporate entity exploits.