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Company Hal

The organisation with self-identity
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I was just thinking about how a company called Carillion went bust recently and the tax payers will probably have to bail out the employees, pension funds etc. Meanwhile the company directors walked away with the usual pay awards..

Companies don’t have much survival instinct, compared to organisms. Probably because they’re are made up of so many separate entities called people all just looking out for themselves and happy to feather their own nests (especially the directors) .

The lower echelons, middle management, down to the guys screwing knobs onto heating ducts in hospitals, they must feel more of the pain when the ship goes down. . But how much really? It’s not exactly life and death - when the tax payer will step in..

If AI ever comes to fruition i’d like to think companies could have a “brain” - identifying itself with the whole organisation and looking out for it, when no one else cares. An AI that comes up via genetic algorithms should have survival instincts anyhow (one supposes.) Therefore wire it up to the company, each nerve attached to a company department, It would ‘live’ vicariously through the company, react with a sense of foreboding to financial mismanagement and not go down without a fight..

Not sure how that last part would work, apart from dobbing poor departments in to the shareholders.. ???

consider this a work in progress - like the liquidation of Carillion

DDRopDeadly, Feb 16 2018

Mike Brotherton https://en.wikipedi...iki/Mike_Brotherton
[Skewed, Feb 20 2018]

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       //Meanwhile the company directors walked away with the usual pay awards.. // The difference between legal and moral. I always wondered how I could get payed royally for a horrendous cock-up. I suppose there's that magical cock-up line, below and you walk away ashamed, above and you buy a house with new address.   

       How would an AI be programed with a moral imperative without foreseen consequences?
wjt, Feb 16 2018
  

       We suggest that it is not necessarily the forseen consequences that you need to be concerned about.
8th of 7, Feb 17 2018
  

       Baked in Sci Fi literature many times over I suspect, though I wouldn't care to do a search to provide examples, but that's OK, because I don't need to, I've an example on my shelf I can point at.   

       Mike Brotherton's Star Dragon from 2003.   

       Pretty sure there are plenty of earlier examples & have to admit I don't rate him much as an author (I always thought this was the kind of place sci fi authors might lurk, so if you're out there sorry about that), the library was selling old stock for pennies & I was short on reading material that month.   

       It's not integral to the story but all the corporations in his story seem to be run by AI's on organic computers in their head office buildings that identify as the corporation itself.   

       That aside..   

       Seems like a grand way to jump start a multi faction person of interest style AI war for supremacy with hundreds of thousands rather than just two participants.. I approve.
Skewed, Feb 20 2018
  

       ////Meanwhile the company directors walked away with the usual pay awards.. // The difference between legal and moral. I always wondered how I could get payed royally for a horrendous cock-up. I suppose there's that magical cock- up line, below and you walk away ashamed, above and you buy a house with new address.//   

       It's rarely a cock-up, all you need is a cast iron "productivity" reward in your employment contract linked to something like gross sales numbers with no call back to actual profits, then you can just reduce the price of the product (to below production costs if necessary) until they sell like hotcakes & ramp production to meet demand (& damn the expense).   

       Just remember to time it right, collect your bonus (don't forget to crow about how much you increased market share & turnover) & get out before the company collapses into bankruptcy.   

       Cue press conference deploring your replacements poor management decisions & how he destroyed the thriving, vibrant company you left him.
Skewed, Feb 20 2018
  

       I believe this idea verges on the WIBNI clause in the help file (over there on the left, under meta)
normzone, Feb 20 2018
  

       Not so sure Norm, even a crude hybrid lash-up constructed from today's net agents, chat bots & market software could provide a reasonably convincing simulacrum of what he's on about, it wouldn't really be AI of course but the appearance would be there (for many if not most).
Skewed, Feb 20 2018
  

       //It's rarely a cock-up//   

       Ooh, don't forget the old "clearing the decks" ploy; that's the one where, on taking over, you review the books and write down the value of all the stock on hand. You declare "It was like that when I got here!" (which of course is true of the assets, though not of their valuation), then you achieve a miracle of wealth-creation by selling at much the same price that the previous management would have achieved.
pertinax, Feb 21 2018
  

       //a church could well be taken over and run by the intelligence of something other than human//   

       Yeah, I think that's *supposed* to happen ... if you think about it. That would be a church functioning as designed. It's the complementary case that's a defect.
pertinax, Feb 23 2018
  

       //How would we stop Al?//   

       With something analogous to a Cantor Diagonalisation. That would be the mathematical equivalent of "Teach it phenomenology." The details are left as an exercise for the reader.   

       Any other questions?
pertinax, Feb 23 2018
  

       // for what purpose I can't fathom //   

       To demonstrate that you and the horse have a perfect rapport, are operating at exactly the same intellectual level, and are therefore both deserving of the immediate application of a captive-bolt humane killer followed by expeditious conversion into pet food.
8th of 7, Feb 23 2018
  

       Steady on, [8th]; you're not going to assimilate many people with *that* sort of talk.
pertinax, Feb 23 2018
  

       We Assimilate intelligent life-forms; horses, and those who consider them worthwhile, are ipso facto not in that category.   

       Horses are by and large extremely stupid creatures, but rarely as stupid as their owners. The concept of keeping a half-tonne block of bone and muscle, operated by a primitive random number generator, as a pet, is foolish enough. Compounding the folly by nailing huge lumps of metal to its feet, thus arming it with a set of lethal Brobdignagian knuckle-dusters, is pure insanity.   

       The damage a horse can do with single, casual kick is terrifying.
8th of 7, Feb 23 2018
  

       Horses are also capable of ignoring humans who have never done them any harm, and simply want them to come in out of the rain so they can be brushed down, have their hooves cleaned, and be given some nice horse food for which they have done nothing whatsoever to earn.   

       // horses use all of their brain matter //   

       No, they don't. If they did, they wouldn't do any of the utterly stupid, self-defeating things they're prone to.
8th of 7, Feb 24 2018
  
      
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