Are corporations superintelligent?
Corporations can be considered superintelligent only in a limited sense. Nick Bostrom
Philosopher who has done research on existential risk from AI and other causes. Formerly head of FHI at Oxford, which he founded. Author of the 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Out of these, corporations come closest to collective superintelligence. Bostrom reserves the term “collective superintelligence” for hypothetical systems much more powerful than current human groups, but corporations are still strong examples of collective intelligence. They can perform cognitive tasks far beyond the abilities of any one human, as long as those tasks can be decomposed into many parallel, human-sized pieces. For example, they can design every part of a smartphone, or sell coffee in thousands of places simultaneously.
However, corporations are still very limited. They don't have speed superintelligence: no matter how many humans work together, they'll never program an operating system in one minute, or play great chess in one second per move. Nor do they have quality superintelligence: ten thousand average physicists collaborating to invent general relativity for the first time would probably fail where Einstein succeeded. Einstein was thinking on a qualitatively higher level.
AI systems could be created one day that think exceptional thoughts at high speeds in great numbers, presenting major challenges we’ve never had to face when dealing with corporations.