An existing, ecologically-successful genus of collectively intelligent artificial creatures

ABSTRACT People sometimes worry about the Singularity (Vinge 1993, Kurzweil 2005), or about the world being taken over by artificially intelligent robots. I believe the risks of these are very small. However, few people recognize that we already share our world with artificial creatures that participate as intelligent agents in our society: corporations. Our planet is inhabited by two distinct kinds of intelligent beings -- individual humans and corporate entities -- whose natures and interests are intimately linked. To coexist well, we need to find ways to define the rights and responsibilities of both individual humans and corporate entities, and to find ways to ensure that corporate entities behave as responsible members of society. CORPORATIONS ARE INTELLIGENT AGENTS A corporation is an artificial legal entity, created by the state through a particular kind of legal agreement. A corporation can own property, can sign contracts, can sue and be sued in court, and can be prosecuted and punished for crimes. It can act as an economic agent on its own behalf in our society. A corporation can have goals, can make plans to achieve those goals, and can use its resources to act to carry out those plans. It solves problems and makes decisions about how best to achieve its goals, so it can be considered as an intelligent agent, as defined by a leading text in Artificial Intelligence (Russell & Norvig 2010, p. 34). An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.... A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors and hands, legs, vocal tract, and so on for actuators.