Source: Corporations becoming actual humans

(A thread started by me on Worldbuilding.stackexchange.com)

Serban Tanasa writes:

There was suddenly a hushed silence in the board room, as the great mahogany doors opened and the 11th Incarnate Avatar of the Great and Holy Ford Motor Corporation walked in.

It was the great insight of the neuromorphic industrial organization experts in the mid-21st century that the pernicious principal-agent problem that had vexed corporations for centuries had an obvious solution: making the corporate entity an agent.

“We are the Ford, we speak for Ford, the whole Ford and nothing but the Ford”, chanted the Avatar. The Executive Leadership Team bowed their heads and generic visual sensory appendages in a respectful ritual pose.

As immortal representations of the essential spirit of the company, most of the avatars required special arrangements, due to their generally monomaniac (some in the past would have called psychopathic) world outlook. Moreover, the strict restrictions on AI incorporation following what later historians would call the Lesser Abomination Crisis meant that all Corporate entities had to be human-corporeal, and thus subject to the random neural growth that biological development inevitably entails. Thus, different Avatar incarnations will necessarily have (not-so-)slight differences in personality caused by random neural development during the vat-growth stage.

The avatar sat on the Great Chair, and its eyes traversed the room. “We remember and acknowledge you. Your security permissions are thus reinstated.” The Executive team breathed a collective sigh of relief. New avatars had the tendency to go for clean slate ELT boards sometimes.

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