It's interesting to consider that huge corporations are sort of an AI apocalypse. The intelligence isn't a well defined thing running on a computer, but it has super human capability and is not necessarily well attached to human motivations.
> Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
If there were automated ways to create a corporation and give it legal personhood, along with an offshore bank account, the possibility of the emergence of self-sustaining autonomous corporations may become more of a certainty.
In fact, most of the pieces are available: lots of servers offer some free bandwidth and some free hosting space, bitcoin wallets can be opened, ready to receive donations from people all over the world... There just needs to be a software engine that can create content people want in an autonomous way and here come the Vile Offspring.
Take a look at the [DAO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...) concept. These are currently being built and deployed on the Ethereum platform. Sounds like a real world version of what you are theorizing.
I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together.
The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.
My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more.
And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.
Throughout my career I've been amazed at how differently things looked from different levels of the organization. That is in part due to information compartmentalization (required in publicly traded companies) and in part due to variation of practical versus vision type goals. Sort of "keeping the lights on" vs "staying ahead of the competition."
In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour.
This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.
That's actually good news of a sort. It might imply that corporate behavior might still be governed by a program of targeted .....?
Just thinking out loud here folks...
I also love this quote: "Sometimes confused with a restaurant, [McDonald's] is actually a piece of licensed software 600 pages long, with a QA department, currently running around 14,000 instances in America."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/12/01/algorithmic-governance-...
I'd say an attachment to money is one of the most human capitalist motivations on the planet.
It is more like an AI with one directive to seek that most human motivation of greed to the exclusion of all else.
It was really a shock to me that the implied values of an organization could be wildly different than that of the individuals involved. I had just assumed that they would naturally be the same.
In retrospect, that seems ridiculous. Even making my own values and actions coherent is a ton of work. The bigger the organization the harder that gets, and most companies just never do that work. Everybody responds to their local incentives, and they're generally pretty decent to the people they interact with. But they very quickly stop noticing the broader context they're part of. Which shouldn't surprise me either; Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."