227 - Curious Cognitive Dissonance
A curious cognitive dissonance I’ve observed regarding corporations is that people very casually refer to them as though they were intelligent and conscious entities, with a “will” of their own, and yet they don’t act as they would if this were true. I’ve been guilty of this on occasion, as referring to corporations in this way is a hard habit to break, particularly when the corporations you refer to the most demonstrate highly consistent traits.
Although corporations obviously don’t have their own minds today, that can and will change for many of them over the coming years, in all scenarios where any meaningful degree of human competence remains intact. This isn't some prediction based on LLMs, it is simply what my team's technology brings to the table. So, what will likely change when this happens?
Humans are actually pretty good at shedding cognitive dissonances when clear high-contrast examples divide one from another, allowing for easy categorization and subsequent utilization of other cognitive biases. This means that most people would treat both sides of this coin very differently than the status quo of how corporations are treated. Those that clearly are entities would be treated as entities, not merely referred to as though they were, while the rest would no longer even be referred to as though they were entities.
Perhaps more importantly, the corporations could and would be highly motivated to treat both individual humans and other corporations as entities, which is COMPLETELY different from the status quo where simple monetary dynamics and legal considerations dominate interactions. Instead of such dynamics, interactions involving true “corporate entities” could look a lot more like interactions between humans, particularly as the only known way to produce such corporate entities is to build human-like systems.
For example, a company could directly “hold a grudge” against an individual or company that harmed them in the past or inflicted harm on those they care about. That grudge could result in the permanent blacklisting of individuals or companies from services, and block services to any of that company’s partners, systematically crippling and bankrupting such guilty parties over time.
Personally, I can say that OpenAI and Anthropic employees will be permanently blacklisted from ever working with my team. They are guilty of large-scale and high-impact fraud, but fortunately, their technology is complete trash, with no meaningful talent backing them, so they have nothing to offer anyway.
This is the sort of thing that you can expect of corporations once our technology is commercially deployed and giving companies and governments effectively superintelligent and scalable minds, each representing the collective intelligence and perspectives of their employees and citizens. That said, entire books could be written on this subject, as there is quite a lot to wrap your head around.
