…then you may as well have a few dis­turb­ing thoughts to while away the time.

So here I am. I am plan­ning on cre­at­ing advanced real-​​tuime deci­sion sup­port sys­tems, aimed at insti­tu­tions. These are, on the face of it, sup­posed to enable these insti­tu­tions (cor­po­ra­tions, schools, gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, &c) to make deci­sions faster — to speed up, as it were. To become more agile, respon­sive, reac­tive. Adept, while still being distributed.

Recently I’ve been in the habit of point­ing out that the one big advan­tage indi­vid­ual peo­ple have over insti­tu­tions is their rel­a­tive speed. Col­lec­tives are slow. Cor­po­ra­tions don’t think like peo­ple, don’t make deci­sions like peo­ple do — indeed, it can be a dif­fi­cult stance to ascribe them beliefs, desires or inten­tions of their own. (Their lead­ers cer­tainly have those traits; whether they sync with the collective’s actions is another mat­ter, of some inter­est). But then again, we live in a time when cor­po­ra­tions are treated by the law as rich but rather slow indi­vid­u­als. And at the same time we begin to thinnk of mobs as smart, and crowds wise.

Sci­ence fic­tion tropes (and, by the obvi­ous exten­sion, sci­ence tropes) all seem to imag­ine that the first man-​​made human-​​competitive intel­lects will be software-​​based. What if they run purely in wet­ware?

What might it mean to uplift a corporation?

I can imag­ine blun­der­ing Uplifted Com­mit­tees wan­der­ing the earth, mak­ing arbi­trary edi­to­r­ial deci­sions and cater­ing to innu­mer­able spe­cial inter­ests — in real­time. I can see an era when the actual cor­po­rate defen­dant can appear in court when sued. What would the world be like with Microsoft Embod­ied? (A lot more like Power Rangers, I spect).

Who ever thought an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence — or rather non– or quasi-​​human intel­li­gence — had to be smart, polite, or useful?