I too hold the view that artificial intelligence is not reliant on computers. Sufficiently complex business logic is impossible for a single person -- even the CEO -- to have an end-to-end view (much less have a significant influence on). The emergent behavior of large companies fits a definition of an AI today; human "decision makers" are increasingly just reviewing and approving the output of algorithms.
I think the end state for large corporations will be to automate away so much of the human input that they end up looking like what we think of as "AI" in a broader cultural context. But we already live in a world controlled by AI, and we have for 3+ decades.
Yeah, I mean, it's a slippery slope, but one worth sliding down. Is autopilot AI? If so, it was invented in 1914. Are speed governors AI? That was James Watt. Are if-then statements AI? That's the basis of human laws, dating back thousands of years.
Are corporations AI, or rather superintelligences, because they are groups of people bound by bylaws? If so, the whole damn world is AI through and through and machine learning is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah, I guess that's my point. Humanity has been guided by largely autonomous systems for much of our existence, but only recently have those systems become sufficiently complex as to remove the possibility of human intervention in some processes due to the complexity involved -- nobody can intervene if nobody can understand the whole story.
I think this is why late-stage capitalism feels so bad to live under: these artificial systems (corporations), by design, stand in direct opposition to our humanity. They exist to prevent our humanity from getting in the way of their perpetual growth by abstracting any ethical problems away so that no human is faced with an ethical dilemma. Which explains why the world so often feels like a dystopian nightmare.
I think the end state for large corporations will be to automate away so much of the human input that they end up looking like what we think of as "AI" in a broader cultural context. But we already live in a world controlled by AI, and we have for 3+ decades.