Corporations, robots and animals: the role of human cognition in rational design

Denis Sunko
Department of Physics
Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb
Zagreb, Croatia

Corporations and animals are rational agents whose behavior is governed by the Nash equilibrium equation. While artificial intelligence is only of the animal kind so far, corporations have historically expressed elements of human intelligence as well. It is argued that currently predictable improvements in both corporate governance and artificial intelligence are to increase the role of entropy in their decision-making, making both robots and corporations more similar to animals than to tools or humans, respectively. The peculiarity of human cognition is the ability to percieve context, which transcends the distinction between program and data. It is expressed in the design of purposeful engines. Modern insights into active thermodynamic engines, as distinct from passive self-organized structures, are leveraged with insights from evolutionary biology to argue that order in human societies is due to closed-circuit currents which, in contrast to relaxation currents, require maintaining not only potential differences but also purposeful feedbacks. These claims are illustrated with a number of contemporary and historical examples, with the particular purpose of clarifying the role of elites in society. It is concluded that a conscious application of the active-engine paradigm is necessary to properly frame the discussion of contemporary societal challenges.