As already mentioned, Jeremy Lent published AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation around the same time that I published the same idea.
He starts, like I did, by citing those who are (rightly) worried that advances in AI could result in the subjugation and extermination of humankind, and points out, like I did, that we are already there with the corporations. He gives some history -- they were first formed for benign purposes, but got so out of control in England that they were temporarily banned in 1720, and goes on to trace their rapid success in this country:
Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the United States, aware of the English experience, were deeply suspicious of corporations, giving them limited charters with tightly constrained powers. However, during the turmoil of the Civil War, industrialists took advantage of the disarray, leveraging widespread political corruption to expand their influence. “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations,” lamented Rutherford Hayes who became President in 1877.
Corporations took full advantage of their new-found dominance, influencing state legislatures to issue charters in perpetuity giving them the right to do anything not explicitly prohibited by law. The tipping point in their path to domination came in 1886 when the Supreme Court designated corporations as “persons” entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed to give equal rights to former slaves enfranchised after the Civil War. Since then, corporate dominance has only been further enhanced by law, culminating in the notorious Citizen United case of 2010, which lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations in elections.
In a section called "Sociopaths with global reach" he explains that we need to understand corporations as sociopaths:
Corporations, just like a potential runaway AI, have no intrinsic interest in human welfare. They are legal constructions: abstract entities designed with the ultimate goal of maximizing financial returns for their investors above all else. If corporations were in fact real persons, they would be sociopaths, completely lacking the ability for empathy that is a crucial element of normal human behavior. Unlike humans, however, corporations are theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.
With the incalculable advantage of their superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world. They have grown so massive that an astonishing sixty-nine of the largest hundred economies in the world are not nation states but corporate entities.
That section concludes:
The result of this corporate takeover of humanity is a world careening out of control, where nature is mercilessly ransacked to extract the raw materials required to increase shareholder value in a vortex of perpetual economic growth, without regard to the quality of human life and with no concern for the welfare of future generations.
In a section about how transnational corporations have taken over global governance to the detriment of the world's human population, he provides the following tidbit:
In fact, the current U.S. cabinet represents the most complete takeover yet of the U.S. government by corporations, with nearly 70% of top administration jobs filled by corporate executives. In the words of Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, “In the Trump administration, auto industry lobbyists are setting transportation policy, Boeing has a top perch at the Department of Defense, Wall Street is in control of financial policy and regulatory agencies, and corporate defense lawyers staff the key positions in the Justice Department.”
Lent proposes solutions as follows:
The corporate takeover of humanity is so all-encompassing that it’s difficult to visualize any other possible global system. Alternatives do, however, exist. Around the world, worker-owned cooperatives have demonstrated that they can be as effective as corporations—or more so—without pursuing shareholder wealth as their primary consideration. The Mondragon cooperative in Spain, with revenues exceeding €12 billion, shows how this form of organization can efficiently scale.
The success of Mondragon, among others, proves there are scalable alternatives to the corporate domination of humanity
There are also structural changes that can be made to corporations to realign their values system with human welfare. Corporate charters can be amended to optimize for a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and financial outcomes (the so-called “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.) A “beneficial” or B-Corp certification, which holds companies to social and environmental performance standards, is becoming more widely adopted and is now held by over 2,000 corporations in over fifty countries around the world.
These are great solutions, but they almost certainly depend on the good will and good work of lawmakers, who need to place the appropriate limits on corporations that will in turn encourage businesses to follow the Mondragon model. And as long as the lawmakers are being paid by the corporations, that's not going to happen.
As I've explained elsewhere, in the U.S. it's not just that the lawmakers are directly beholden to their corporate donors. As the two Trump impeachments demonstrate, they are also beholden to their political parties, which are also a form of AISO. So really, the only way to get anywhere is to elect candidates who are not beholden to any particular party or any set of corporate values, but truly want to do what is best for their constituencies, not to mention the U.S. public.
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