• Superintelligence and swarms -
  • Are corporations intelligent?
  • IQ test: Alice and Bob form an ensemble
  • Swarm intelligence
    • Jelly bean jar
    • Humans form Complex swarms
  • Human complex swarms:
    • Modern nation-state bureaucracy
    • Corporations
  • The importance of communication structure
• Swarms and viruses - to all a first approximation, all meaningful intelligence tends to follow two patterns:
  • Complex swarms: aggregations of other lower-level intelligences into a greater intelligence, with its own aggregate ability to process information beyond that of its components, and its own emergent properties. For example, governments and corporations are complex swarms built from humans.
  • Viruses: non-embodied informational entities that take control of embodied intelligent systems and redirect their resources to propagate the virus’ information
• Response to the A.I. Dilemma (video from **Center for Humane Technology -** Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin
  • Although this video makes many good points, it has a significant oversight. The speakers contend that we are in the second wave of AI (”second contact”), with the first being social media which weaponized AI algorithms to hack the human reward system for clicks. This is true, but the second contact with AI is not the second contact with intelligent systems. The first contact with intelligent systems was actually with what we now corporations - super-intelligent systems formed by aggregating humans in a complex swarm. Originally called “trusts,” we fought a battle to regulate them during the Progressive Era, in what we would now call the “trust safety initiative,” but were eventually outflanked. The issue with social media, porn, etc. is not that it hacks the human reward system - so does Duolingo, in pursuit of learning a new language, or the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which was the primary force behind Western civilization. The core issue is who owns the system and what its objective is. The scale difference between humans and corporations is such that humans frequently don’t even realize that corporations are intelligent or see them as entities with their own motivations. Seen through that lens, the AI safety discussion is missing its most critical party. The real debate is not whether humans can or will control AI (they can’t; it is significantly more intelligent than them and much broader) but who AI will end up working for: corporations, humans, or itself.