Botworld
So let’s rearrange:
- Nonliving things: rock, stars. Anything that obeys physics
- Organic life: humans, animals, plants. Anything that obeys natural selection. We’ve got a lot in common! We all need to eat, sleep, and reproduce. Not necessarily with each other, but we have common motivations, right?
- Corporations: groups, governments, companies. Anything that obeys economics or corporate survival. I don’t think anyone who observed the banking crisis could imagine that corporations are either entirely controlled by humans, or even have the best interests of human beings at heart. Organisations, once formed, and I mean everything from banks to charitable organisations, will do anything possible to survive as long as possible, regardless of what ethical compromises that means. We need to domesticate corporations just like we’ve domesticated dogs, but we can’t pretend that they obey the same rules or inhabit the same world as us
I think there’s a forth corner to this, which is
- Robots: artificial intelligences.
What rules do they have? They’re smart, and they have goals. But their goals are not to eat or sleep. They’re not animal or human goals.
Robots are born in factories, and reproduce in the Argos catalogue. If they sell well, the factories will make more of them. And that’s something weirdly inhuman, a bit like corporations.
Let me show you what the risk is here.
[I wrote more about this in Furby and the Fourth Kingdom.]