(I walk to my stacks, pull out Shapiro and Varian, Information Rules, a Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (1999) and Dolan and Simon,Power Pricing (1996)... grimace at Tho. Stewart, Wealth of Knowledge (2001)... return)

World of coders now equipped to transform 'barriers to entry' into moats.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Corporations are AI entities already, Romney could say.

Its debatable whether the aims are achievable, but it's absolutely clear that the development of independent, self-enhancing intelligence - which transcends the abilities of its developers - is a core aim.

And the aim has been attained in minor ways across many fields. Google's AlphaGo developers didn't need to understand Go to master level to be able build a system capable of beating a master.

The only difference with general AI is that the goal is to automate learning itself, not to solve specific problems in one limited domain.

Of course this requires the design of a system with discrimination and abstraction - not necessarily a purpose in human terms, but still an explicit meta-goal.