James Bridle on Corporations

8 October 2024

In the introduction of their book Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle writes of being asked at a speaking engagement about when they think artificial superintelligence will emerge. Bridle’s response is quite fascinating: “It’s already here. It’s corporations.”

Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, and the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That’s a description of an AI—it’s also a description of a modern corporation.

There’s some potent information here about just why corporate neoliberalism is failing us: this suggests that corporations are, by their very nature, inhuman(e). What fascinates me is that these human-constructed systems have somehow run away from us, and I have a great deal of curiosity around why that might be. I think their scale is a huge factor; the inputs they respond to tend to soar high above things like the wellbeing and socioeconomic standing of their lower-income employees and the communities they inhabit. But as someone who grew up in a town of automotive factories, many of which shuttered during the 2008 economic crash, I can attest that these things matter and are deeply felt at ground level.

I wonder what it would take at this point to re-humanize our economy?