Intelligent Design

Darwin did more than come up with "Evolution". He basically invented modern biology. He's a member of the modern pantheon. Like Einstein, is name is dropped to lend a bit of authority to ideas that may or may not make sense otherwise.

Most of us are familiar with the modern debate between Evolution and "Intelligent Design". Most "modern" thinkers are firmly in the "Darwinian" camp. The evidence is overwhelming that "Darwinian evolution" is responsible for life on Planet Earth. Some even take the step to assert that the very definition of life must include what they think of as "Darwinian" evolution.

This way of defining "life in general" often involves a drastic misunderstanding of Darwin's theory. This misunderstanding is signalled by the characterization of Darwin's idea as "Survival of the Fittest". Actually, Darwin's fundamental insight was "Descent with modification", the idea that all life descends from a common "root" and that variations within each generation ultimately account for the stunning variety of species we find on the planet today. "Survival of the fittest" (coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin) is shorthand for the idea that one way to account for variation in body plan over time is accounted for more "fit" individuals out-competing less "fit" individuals and therefore having more reproductive success. The problem with this idea is that it's a bit of a tautology. It's hard to define "fitness" in any way other than "reproductive success". Darwin didn't think that this was the *only* way to account for variation, but some modern "evolutionists", such as Dawkins, seem to think he did. To my mind, it doesn't matter if Darwin thought this or not. There are dozens of additional ways to account for the fact that we have pelicans and petunias, all descended from a common ancestor. What "Darwinism" rules out is the presence of an intelligent hand in the process -- what's called a "teleological" element, something that drives the process with an end in mind. If you see purpose in evolution, you believe in "Intelligent Design" and you are free to believe whatever you like about who or what has this purpose, although believers in Intelligent Design mostly seem to think that "proof" of Intelligent Design = "proof" that the Bible is "true".

One of the big mysteries in biology is how you get from non-biological processes to biology as we see it today. While the gap is gradually closing, we need to admit that we have no idea how chemistry made the huge leap from ordinary chemical processes to, for example, RNA.  As one might expect, proponents of Intelligent Design point to this gap (and all gaps in our understanding) as "evidence" for Intelligent design. We don't know what happened here, so intelligence must be what happened. This has given Intelligent Design such a bad reputation that many people have banished the idea from consideration, even in situations where the question is: what is life. To these people, the answer must involve "Darwinian" principals. In particular, if the process in question doesn't evolve -- in particular doesn't involve "survival of the fittest" - then it's not life. Which brings me (at last!) to my point. Here is what Kuipers has to say about "corporations" to support his idea that it makes sense to think of them as "alive":

Corporations are not invulnerable, of course, since they can die of starvation, merge with or be devoured by others, or be destroyed in some other way. Indeed, corporate entities exist and evolve in a world of Darwinian selection, which naturally leads to a survival drive. (A robot, on the other hand, is a human-designed artifact and it may or may not have a survival drive.)

 As in conventional evolutionary theory, this statement has the problem of being a tautology (things that survive survive) but there is no particular reason that something needs a survival drive to survive. The elephant in the room is robots are obviously Intelligently Designed (by us) and have no need to "evolve" in a "Darwinian" way.

In the search for truly different forms of life (on Mars, for example), we have been forced to take a really hard look at how we might test to see if something is "alive". The Mars landers look for metabolism - a specific process(chemical in this case) that converts compounds in the environment to other compounds "useful" for life.

As with pelicans and petunias, competition is not irrelevant to corporate survival. But corporations most frequently die due to failure to establish a viable metabolism long before they encounter competition (corporate metabolism basically involves finding or creating customers for a product or service that the corporation can supply in a sustained way). If we want to  study the idea that corporations are, in some sense, "alive", we need to broaden our understanding of what "life" is. In the end, it's a matter of definition as long as we don't take our definitions as stand-ins for real understanding.

Kuipers goes further ...

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 an AI researcher, Kuipers is naturally asking if it's possible to see the corporation as not merely alive but intelligent. This leads him into the tricky territory of agency. Does a corporation "know what it's doing"? Dragon theory assumes that "life forms" like this have as much "agency" a virus.

This is where Kuipers' approach departs from dragon theory. Kuipers views the corporation as composed of the people who operate it (like cells in a human body). Dragon theory distinguishes between the corporation and the people it "assimilates". In dragon theory, the assimilated people continue to operate with all the familiar characteristics of humans - greed, ignorance, optimism, altruism, ... -- and attempt to use the corporation to meet these human needs. The most common human "purpose" for the corporation is making a profit for shareholders, but it is just as likely to be a vehicle for white collar crime, money laundering, tax avoidance, offloading losses from other corporations or merely massaging the ego of individuals who feel more important if they are "incorporated". Like an Apple II computer, which makes a great paper weight, the corporation does not "have" an intrinsic purpose. It is not even "amoral".

 Dragon theory holds that people very often fail to control the corporation, which is usually a machine that is too complex for any person to understand or completely control. "Control" of a corporation is exercised by many stake holders - customers, employees, government -- not just "management".  It turns out that both approaches lead to a similar concern about the fact that corporation is inherently amoral, however, by seeing corporate control as coming only from management, Kuipers defines away the influence that other stake holders have on the corporation. Most obviously, the corporation puts food on the table for its employees and provides a product or service that is (arguably) of benefit to its customers. A corporation that does not pay its employees or sell its products has a serious problem surviving.

Kuipers' sketch of the corporate "mind" identifies the purpose of the corporation with the official purpose of senior management, especially the board. Dragon theory casts a much wider net. This is very similar to the question of what should be included when you speak of a human being. Are we "just" brains with appendages and support systems? Are we everything inside our skin? What elements of our environment should be included in the definition? At what point in the process of raising, killing and eating a chicken does a chicken become "me"? Most of us would agree that the "brain" idea is much too narrow.  Failure of my brain may end my existence, but failure of my kidneys or failure to find food will do the job just as well. In a similar way, identifying the "corporation" as the people who "work for" the corporation seems arbitrarily narrow, especially in a discussion that want to ultimately talk about survival of the corporation.

Dragon theory has the luxury of distinguishing "stake holders" (assimilated to varying degrees) from the dragon itself, so we avoid the embarrassment of omitting the human needs of employees and customers from our definition of the corporate entity. This allows dragon theory to look at ordinary issues like economics and quality control without bending the language or re-defining terms in common use. The dragon (corporation is a special case) is simply seen as a machine with a metabolism that may be considered "alive" or not, depending on how you want to stretch the definition of "life". Dragon theory examines the metabolism of the dragon in its own right, including things that concern Kuipers, such as what the dragon "knows", how it "learns" things and how it interacts with its environment to survive another day. The dragon is not "trying" to survive - it is mindless. The designers of the dragon (us) usually want a survivable dragon and think they have designed it that way, but the actual ability of the dragon to survive and thrive depend on factors beyond the ken of ordinary humans.

Dragon theory does not disagree with Kuipers. It's all a matter of definition. Ultimate concerns overlap more than they differ. It's far too early to tell if one approach (or either approach!) tells us something new and useful about the real role of corporations in human society.

Stephen J. Gould, who taught me everything I know about evolution and why we have pelicans and petunias, warned us that "contingency" -- blind luck -- plays a big role in what variations actually survive. He taught that nature "allows" rather than favours "bigger and more complex", but also especially loves "small and simple". He had great insight into the fact that species have not always been able to "vary their way out" of the problems set by their environment. Changes are restricted to fundamental "assumptions" built into our "DNA".  All these insights shed light on our analysis of that new "life" form, the "corporation". Even though Gould banished intelligent design from every corner of biology, his insights turn out to apply to corporations that are intelligently designed. His insights include "Darwinism" as a special case!