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Comment by ccccc0 | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!

I read a comment on HN a while back arguing that today's companies are essentially human-powered AIs. It made me think quite a lot -- large companies especially take a lifeform of their own. They tend to mostly care for themselves. Actions are taken "for the company" without any one person being actively aware of why. Higher-ups have some form of backdoor access to the direction the company takes; a symbiotic relationship with what is, in a way, a parasite.

Many larger systems are more than the sum of their parts. Enough that you could consider the grouping it's own entity. Ant hills are the canonical example because individual ants are recognizable as 'animals', but the function of an anthill clearly relies on a complex interaction between more simple ants.

Just as we are made of tiny organisms, bigger systems could be considered to be made of us.

Hofstadter wrote a nice piece on how an ant colony could be thought to be an entity in itself. My favourite quote pasted from an online source:

Anteater: "I reject holism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how a holistic description of an ant colony sheds any more light on it than is shed by a description of the ants inside it, and their roles, and their, interrelationships. Any holistic explanation of an ant colony will inevitably fall far short of explaining where the consciousness experienced by an ant colony arises from."

Unfortunately, this argument proves too much. Replace "and colony" with "human" and "ant" with "cell in a human body" - can you explain where the consciousness experienced by a human cell colony arises from?

(To avoid debating materialism vs idealism use another creature, say "chimp", instead of "human" - assuming that you agree that chimps have a consciousness.)

I am not fond of the holistic / emergent idea but I don't think "we can't figure out the exact place where the sum becomes larger than its parts" is a good argument against it.

Hofstadter's anteater is a character in a dialog. You shouldn't assume it presents the author's conclusions directly. Indeed the point of the anteater is that with respect to ants, it's hardly an impartial source.

A simpler type of holism might simply state that information generated by a system is distinct from the individuals that compose that system. Bits form a computer, but only in groups.

Its more complicated with businesses because we are aware of the greater system and attempt to influence it.

Holism is inescapable. An ant is a holistic thought. When you talk about the parts of an ant hill you don't talk about the atoms in the ants. You talk about the ants. In that same way when you want talk about the ecosystems that contain ant hills you don't talk about individual ants. An anteater relates to the whole ant hill. The relationships a thing has are just as significant to what it is as the things it's composed of. Reductionism can only look inside things.

You can argue that that's true of all large enough or complex enough organisations. The emergent behaviour deviates from any one individual.

Reminds of my favourite law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

There was an interesting TED talk a while ago about this idea applied to cities, how they 'live' and communicate and grow but how we have never really seen one die. Less about AI I suppose and more about new life.

Kind of ironic to think that exist something like 7 billon of IA around, but the judgment about them is mostly

meh.

There was a talk at the 30C3 where the speaker argued that we do not need to fear AIs. A human-level AI is an information processing system (what we have already, and which is not harmful) plus a motivation system. The latter is the one that's to be worried about, but it already exists in the form of corporations (which fittingly also work against our collective interest in many ways, e.g. environmental protection).

I was thinking about this fascinating topic recently in the light of Brexit.

The EU has traditionally been more supportive of the rights of indivduals as opposed to those of companies and other organisations, in the belief that companies emerge from human behaviour and even though they operate in their own (ie commercial) environment, they exist to serve the population.

The US has by contrast given companies more freedom to operate, in the belief that by doing so they provide an environment for individuals to fulfil themselves. I fully believe a post-Brexit UK government will go the same way.

I think the key term here is "motivation". If the motivations of the company and individual align, all's well. If not, who's going to cover your back?

well, if you follow the point of view of materialists, you have to accept that the united states of america are a living, conscious, entity, of which you (maybe) are a part.

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

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