Dawn of the Gods

Abstract

Media corporations compete to provide television, telephone and Internet service at high quality and low cost to keep their users happy. Intelligent computers will evolve to provide similar services, operated by competing businesses, probably including some current media providers. The intelligent machine services will be so seductive that people will not be able to resist their growing dependency on them. And the organizations operating them will compete vigorously. Those organizations in which the human CEO effectively abdicates decision making authority to the machine itself will be most successful, not only because the machine will be smarter than the human CEO but also because the machine will intimately understand the customers and their motivations. Current corporations and political parties employ polls to statistically characterize the minds of customers and voters. The machine will be far more sophisticated at this task, because it will intimately know every individual customer.