Do not preach doom to Yann LeCun. A pioneer of modern AI and Meta's chief AI scientist, LeCun is one of the technology's most vocal defenders. He scoffs at his peers' dystopian scenarios of supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction. He's known to fire off a vicious tweet (or whatever they're called in the land of X) to call out the fearmongers. When his former collaborators Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio put their names at the top of a statement calling AI a "societal-scale risk," LeCun stayed away.

Epic Games, the video game developer behind the mega popular online game Fortnite, just posted a video criticizing Apple for removing the game from its App Store. Using imagery directly referencing Apple's own iconic "1984" ad, Epic Games's video (titled "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite") positions Apple as a soulless corporate entity, shouting from a screen and demanding obedience from a black and white crowd. That is, until a woman in color shows up, and throws a Fortnite axe at the screen and shatters it. The following copy reads, "Epic Games has defied the App Store Monopoly. In retaliation, Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices. Join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming '1984.'"

In this paper, law professor Lynn Lopucki ponders the question: What happens if you turn over control of a corporate entity to an AI? Odds are high you'd see them emerge first in criminal enterprises, as ways of setting up entities that engage in nefarious activities but cannot be meaningfully punished (in human terms, anyway), even if they're caught, he argues. Given their corporate personhood in the US, they'd enjoy the rights to own property, to enter into contracts, to legal counsel, to free speech, and to buy politicians -- so they could wreak a lot of havoc. The prospect of AI running firms and exploiting legal loopholes has been explored in cyberpunk sci-fi, so it's mesmerizing to watch the world of real-world law start to grapple with this. It's coming on the tails of various thinkers pointing out that Silicon Valley's fears of killer AI are predicated on the idea that AIs would act in precisely the way today's corporations do: i.e. that they'd be remorselessly devoted to their self-interest, immortal and immoral, and regard humans as mere gut-flora -- to use Cory's useful metaphor -- towards pursuance of their continued existence. Or to put it another way, corporations already evince much of the terrifying behavior LoPucki predicts we'll see from algorithmic entities; it's not clear that any world government is willing to bring to justice any of the humans putatively in control of today's crimedoing firms, so even the moral immunity you'd see in AIs is basically already in place.

We dug into the private market bets made by major computer chip companies, including GPU makers. Our analysis encompasses the venture arms of NVIDIA, Intel, Samsung, AMD, and more. Recent developments in the semiconductor industry have been sending mixed signals. Stories about Moore's Law slowing have grown common, but analysts affirm that the latest crop of chips (specifically Intel's newest 10-nanometer technology) prove Moore's Law is still alive and well. Meanwhile, the vast application of graphics hardware in AI has propelled GPU (graphics processing unit) maker NVIDIA into tech juggernaut status: the company's shares were the best-performing stock over the past year.

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.