You guys remember that great sci-fi trope where a global computer/robot system runs amok and determines that the best thing for the planet is the extermination of humanity? You know, like Skynet from the Terminator films, or the Machines of the Matrix? Well, I done just had a thought about the war between humanity and AI - and I realized that Skynet has been live and dangerous for a while now.

This realization has come arm in arm with another, more pervasive and more interesting insight: artificial intelligence does not need some sort of complex computer system on which to run. AI is at its core little more than set of rules: If A, then B. Run, rinse, repeat to maximize Z. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Corporate Law

The entire structure of corporate law, from the protections for individuals within the corporation to the legally mandated imperative to turn a profit, can be interpreted as a sort of primitive but sweeping artificial intelligence network. Decisions are made not by individuals within the company but by the rules and policies which govern the way the company works. In this sense, cororations can be seen as large stupid programs which carry out a very simple operation, with varying degrees of success: they are to make money.

As a type of intelligence competing against similar but rival intelligences over a scarce resource, corporations can almost be said to adhere to a sort of natural selection: those corporations that prove most fit will go on to survive, muliply and thrive - those that fail for whatever reason to maximize their profit will die.

The Problem

So...in a world where it's easy for a multinational corporation to rape some developing country for some crazy valuable resource, pay the workers a hundrendth of what their work would command on an open market, then export the profits to corporate HQ in Switzerland or Dubai or whatever in the name of free market capitalism, what's the lesson?

More directly: the industrial-military complex makes this entire issue overt. Defense contractors are an enormous part of our overall economy. A perpetual state of warfare is the ideal environment for a defense contractor, because that's where the greatest demand will be found. Those corporations most successful in finding customers are those most adept at finding war - and the best of the best are those who can get into positions of power from which they can ensure that there's always a war going on. Sure, there are individual players like Dick Cheney and George Buch and that entire cabal - but the state of affairs cannot be laid at their feet exclusively. They are merely pawns, just doing their jobs - it's the system itself that is at fault. Evolutionary forces compell the profit-driven AI to maximize profit, and if that means perpetuating war then so be it. That's the nature of the beast.

Another Way

It takes humanity, it takes compassion and it takes genuine concern for the well-being of others for some CEO to put a stop to exploitive business practices. It takes a very human intelligence to treat humans as humans - to put the worth of human lives above the worth of the dollar. The corporate AI is incapable of this operation - it's a stupid machine, very good at what it does but not much good at anything else; you can't teach a beast that only values profit to suddenly place value on human life. For the human members of a company to step in and do so is to compromise the evolutionary fitness of the corporation - to devote resources to humanity is to devote them away from profit, and simple evolution teaches us that in a competitive gene pool a move away from fitness can be catastrophic.

Hopeless Conclusion

So, do you see it? The final piece of the puzzle: we rely on the network of codependent corporations for almsot every facet of our way of life. To disrupt the corporate AI is to undermine the very infrastructure of our lives. Far easier to deny the problems, condemn the complainers and act like all is well. We have created a monster, and it serves us well - but it eats lives, human beings, entire regions. As long as we are tethered to a system that puts profit above humanity, we are only marching towards babylon and a final showdown.

And so Skynet lives and it gives us our iPods and our well-stocked grocery stores and our lovely mom-and-pop weapons industries and our nice cars and our clothing and our running water and our electricity - all it asks in return is perpetual human sacrifice, which we're more than happy to provide. But what happens when south america runs out of bodies? What happens when East Asia creates their own beast?

What happens when, as the movies have always taught us is inevitable, Skynet finally turns on us?