trying to figure out the origins/earliest reference to the clever observation that corporations are a form of "artificial intelligence"--the 2018 @cstross CCC talk comes up a lot in citations; I first heard it from @dymaxion in 2014 but years later she attributed it to Stross, so maybe he'd been working on it for a while before the 2018 CCC
@ingrid @brewsterkahle Are you looking specifically for the phrase “artificial intelligence” or more generally that corps are a sort of collective cognition?
@ingrid @cstross Benjamin Kuipers published about it in 2012 https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4116
@clayote @ingrid @cstross As far as a totally explicit articulation, this predates the one I always think of, @sparks’s: https://quietbabylon.com/2013/the-singularity-already-happened-we-got-corporations/
@ingrid @cstross @dymaxion I’ve had it in my head for a year or so now that organizations in general are a form of artificial intelligence (and have a WIP that may explore the idea a bit if I ever get around to finishing it), but for me that particular idea arose as a response to @adapalmer’s description of empires as prosthetics (and was no doubt also influenced by the Hobbesian ideas that her work also draws from).
@ingrid @cstross @dymaxion @adapalmer I also vaguely remember an article from a number of years ago about how the first AI’s would likely resemble bureaucracies, but I couldn’t tell you when or where it was.
@ingrid I feel like I got the idea from YOU in like 2016 or 2017
there's also this @brewsterkahle blog post from 2014: https://brewster.kahle.org/2014/05/08/corporations-are-the-1st-generation-ais/