Corporations are intelligent. They have goals, they take actions they believe will help attain those goals, and they are able to identify when those goals are attained.

Corporations are amoral machine intelligences.

They have inhuman goals, they act toward those goals in ways humans simply could not, and those goals do not in the slightest regard human life as valuable.

They are to humans what you are to your gut flora.

They're machine intelligences, most built long before computers even existed.

Turns out, you only need capitalism and some form of spreedsheet or double entry ledger.

These machine intelligences, built out of spreadsheets and ledgers, act toward their inhuman goals over timespans of generations, but they have reflexes measured in seconds. Between DMCA strikedowns to drawn out lawsuits, their defensive mechanisms are unmatched in nature.

These machine intelligences are in many ways the low-hanging fruit of machine intelligence. They're the easiest, cheapest, least technological to make.

Programmers, working for these machine intelligences, are for decades always a few years away from making the next ones.

These machine intelligences may be low-hanging fruit, they may be built out of excel and before that dusty books, but look at how they've shaped the world toward their ends.

They've been wildly successful as the planet's premier apex predator.

Whether it's genociding millions of humans, or driving another species wholly extinct, melting a tundra to burning a rainforest, those machine intelligences show absolutely zero regard for any life not like itself.

And nothing, from a tiger or a tiger shark to a human, has evolved a defense mechanism.

To these machine intelligences, every other life form is a dodo bird lacking any kind of self defense against it.

Corporations *are* the AI apocalypse that scifi warns about. But that's not the scary thing.

The scary thing is, they're the easiest, cheapest, least complex, and in most ways *least intelligent* inhuman machine intelligence. They're top of our food chain, but still plankton.

Now consider billionaires. Billionaires are, basically, avatars of these machine intelligences. Thin human disguises they place on themselves toward their goals.

Billionaires look human. They mostly act human. But they advance the goals of nonhuman intelligences that do not, whatsoever, have a sense of morality or value human life.

That sense you feel, when regarding a billionaire, is uncanny valley. It's something that looks and acts, almost human.

Billionaires *are* the humanoid robots scifi likes talking about.