Intelligence, as far as we know, is the result of a network’s interactions — a series of interconnected nodes that pass information back and forth. Our own neural networks do this to reach complex states and solve problems. These patterns create the appearance of thought and the sense of will. They evolved by trial and error over billions of years. In the study of machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’ve tried to simulate the ability for dumb networks to make smart decisions. We create reinforcement learning systems that simulate billions of years of evolution in a few hours. What we may not realise is that we have created intelligent networks throughout history. Our religions, our governments, and now our corporations — and they are destroying the world.

We’ve missed the emergence of these cultural intelligences because we only look down. We somehow decided the little fleshy network we lug around on our shoulders is the top of the pyramid. We assume that our brain is the most complex network of all, the emergent patterns that we describe as feeling, idea and meaning, the most valid and real. However, we are just nodes in much more complex intertwining systems that could be called intelligent in some senses of the word. Religions, neighbourhoods, ideologies. Larger networks, with humans as the nodes.

These emergent cultural intelligences have evolved a-pace with us. Each institution or network with lives spanning from hundreds to thousands of years. While we cannot hear them think or feel, we can surely see their personality in our history and collective memory. The arrogance of Rome, now in its dotage, the idiosyncrasies of Australia, so young, born in the amniotic fluid of genocide and colonialism.

Corporation as an entity

From this slurry of primordial cultural intelligences, a new form of life has evolved — corporate intelligence. A decision-making network more powerful, organised and reproducible than any other intelligence network to date. While corporations have been recognised since ancient Rome, we wrote the first lines of mercantile corporate code in the 1600’s to exploit Asia. These corporations evolved into independent bodies, with rights and privileges enshrined with the Joint Stock Company Act of 1844. We created a system of rules and feedback loops, not knowing that their evolution would go into overdrive. This leads us to today, where these corporate systems are efficient, resourced and hyper-tuned to external stimulus, driving their evolution even further.

What makes a system intelligent

To consider this, we need to look briefly at three things — the study of artificial intelligence (AI), our understanding of how organic intelligence works, and how these two things intertwine. AI research is the study of ‘intelligent agents’ that can understand and affect their environment. They have a set of goals and can measure their effectiveness against these goals and increase their ability to achieve successful outcomes.

An artificial neural network is made up of a network of nodes. Data passes through these nodes, and the network adjusts based on reward or punishment. This isn’t quite a brain, but we can see similarities between that and an organic neural network. The electrical impulses that drove single cell organisms were rewarded because those twitching masses got more nutrients, which slowly coagulated into networks that passed their network patterns through the generations. The most successful neural network patterns survived, became more complex, and more efficient at transmitting information and processing stimulus. Our brains are really just hungry bacteria that got really good at their jobs.

But what does this have to do with corporations, religions or the study of AI? While artificial neural networks are similar to the mind, they are not trying to recreate the mind. What is important here is this feedback loop. This is created when a network with stimulus, impact and self-direction is given a goal it can measure. This network will slowly get better at hitting that goal. Most modern-day machine learning is based on this idea.

Coagulation ad infinitum

So after our little neurons — binary things that fire electrical impulses — got really good at walking around and eating bananas, new networks started to emerge. Loosely at first — for example, a collection of hunters or a community built around a set of beliefs. As you’d expect, the networks got stronger as they responded to stimulus. The ability to pass information back and forth got more efficient. From oral history to rock painting. A violent animal went from an immediate threat to something people could prepare for. This got encoded into the network, and pass through generations — ensuring the network’s survival. And just as we went from a primordial soup to more complex structures with names and favourite colours, so too did these networks becomes world-spanning intelligences linking people together.

The most obvious and lasting emergent intelligences can be seen in religions. They have a clearly defined set of parameters, though these emerged naturally, as a response to stimuli. Perhaps a group in an early tribe learnt that chanting in unison convinced the others to cooperate. Maybe effective symbolism kept the idea alive over generations, keeping the network structure intact. Around these kernels of structures, rules were formed. These parameters were codified in texts. Neural pathways forming between monasteries and mosques. From these networks the first multi organism cultural consciousnesses clawed their way out of the dark, to bestride the world. Hand in hand came governance, more rules, more ways to transfer data, and make decisions. Networks made up of millions of hyper-capable nodes, human beings. Networks that could understand their environment, affect it, measure the result, and course correct. Whether with beheadings, treaties, revolutions, famines or cultural change.

So perhaps these networks were sentient. In the same way our consciousness evolved to create the impression of the mind, perhaps Rome felt heartbreak as its roads eroded, or Islam mulled its older sibling Christianity when it couldn’t sleep. Perhaps the god we pray to is simply the mind we form a part of. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter. That we think or feel isn’t relevant to the functioning of our network, they are byproducts of our cell’s hunt for nutrients.

A new god emerges

The creation of corporations is where these networks take an interesting turn. In the 19th century, the birth, death and interplay between these emergent cultural intelligences were unprecedented. It was also starting to be directed by consensus, we were writing constitutions, manifestos and laws. We were starting to rewrite the code of the cultural intelligences that engulfed us.

Then out of the boom of colonisation, a new network was conceived. A way to distribute liability when investing capital. No more, no less. So we used our existing legal systems to create a new type of entity. We set clear rules and gave them autonomy from the government and the individual. Its primary objective was to seek profit, how it does it is irrelevant. To drive towards this goal we created reward systems. In the same way dopamine floods our neurons when we do a life-giving act, executives are flooded with cash when they increase profits. To complete the feedback look we needed pain receptors. So we created a corporate code that punished people for acting out of the interests of profit. Today you get into a lot more legal trouble harming shareholders than the environment.

In establishing the first corporate charter we unwittingly created our first autonomous network, our first intelligent agent, the first “AI”. While we’d done similar with the Magna Carta, and participated in these networks throughout history, these corporations were the first to be independent, and quickly became the most efficient and effective system for responding to stimulus. And in doing so they ate the world.

Escaping the petri dish

Fuelled by a heuristic tree you could sketch on paper, these new corporations grew their network, adding nodes via wooden ships, ink and paper. Money and information flowed through them, and like those early complex celled organisms, patterns emerged, where those patterns increased profit. Much like dumb networks, they grew without thought of their host or the damage they caused. This structure was more effective at reproducing than the last emergent cultural intelligence, civic governance. The dictates of the free market, with profit as the dopamine response, meant that the networks got stronger, faster. They coincided with — and fueled — a technological boom. They spearheaded a whole new type of network, with the digital revolution. However, where the governments of the day had a reward system based on the support of the people — votes or violence — the corporation had enshrined in its code only one feedback loop. Money.

That last bit in Akira

So consider what happens when you create an artificial intelligence with one goal to — create wealth. Then you enshrine its parameters into an already robust (though analogue) system — hundreds of years of commonwealth law, built on a millennium of Roman legal tradition. What happens when you let it rewrite its code, spread and propagate, only accountable to one thing? Why it’ll learn of course. It’ll learn that when you expend less capital on worker safety, even if you lose money in claims, you still come out on top. It will decide that this is the best way to go and adjust accordingly. It’ll code this knowledge into its nodes. No one person responsible for the overarching system, much like a brain cell can’t hear a thought, neither can we as parts of the system really understand the patterns we participate in.

This isn’t a new idea, but when you apply this intelligent agent view to social structures, rather than encountering a science fiction styled megamind, you can see the way that stimulus-response networks carry from the micro to the macro scale. It doesn’t matter if Rome feels itself burn, or if Facebook is smug that it destroyed America. What matters is that we both participate in, and create these systems. This protocol for intelligence we created isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. We have begun to alter them significantly, rewriting corporate law to add social and environmental good to the feedback loop. Governments, the bodies that first penned the parameters of corporate intelligence are desperately trying to rewrite the code. But these corporations have escaped the petri dish, existing as supranational entities that now dictate the code base of their masters through lobying and financial pressure. At the same time, corporate intelligences seek faster, more efficient nodes. From computers, which superpowered the human mind, to their own autonomous agents, we now have a Mandelbrot tree of intelligences forming, bathing in a solution of profit, pulsating and expanding to consume the globe.

Taming the beasts

So what happens when you create a monster? The first step surely is to recognise it. Recognise that these autonomous systems we have created didn’t just consume us, they birthed us. These structures have formed the basis for our evolutionary success, these larger networks can also be found in family, in community groups. Jesus said it, whenever there’s a gathering of Christians, there is a church.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. We create and nurture cultural intelligences every day. Let’s recognise we have created in corporate structures the ability to pass data and make decisions faster. To design and build and create. Let’s also consider that every time we create a new corporation, we fork the project, and have the chance to create a new type of entity. For example, a worker’s cooperative, where profit is owned by the worker, who’s reward centres are also tied to the human-centric networks of community and family. Let’s consider that the neural network of modern corporations are their communication platforms, and find ways to create these digital town squares outside of the profit machine. Finally, let’s perform an experiment. Let’s consider an entity whose feedback loop is tied to the wellbeing of women, indigenous people, migrants and the planet. Let’s assert that it will be more successful than one driven by a single number. A number that serves the few white men that act as the Pyramidal cells of the corporate hippocampi that are chewing up our world.

Perhaps we can create a new form of cultural intelligence, trained in love and compassion, or evolve the ones we participate in today. We stood down the kings and queens and replaced monarchy with systems whose feedback loop was better tied to the people. So perhaps we can rewrite the source code of corporate intelligence, or spawn new forms, that serve the networks they share the world with. For now, consider what networks you form a part of, and how you can reprogram your own information flow, to serve kindness, compassion and hope.