Is the World Already Crawling With Artificial Super-Intelligences?

Amid the present furor over progress in the area of chatbot development many a commentator is raising the tired old specter of inhuman intelligences, perhaps super-intelligences, emerging and escaping human control, perhaps to wreak havoc of a kind that will threaten human freedom and even survival.

Arguably the world has long seen its life dominated by such super-intelligences--the "artificial men" of Thomas Hobbes, the "corporate persons" brought into modern jurisprudence by a nineteenth century argument over railway fences. These entities, with their resources of surveillance, data-processing, decision and action far, far beyond that of any one human, at once everywhere and nowhere, and theoretically capable of living forever, are just as artificial as anything contained within the casing of a computer--and for many a hapless individual just as incomprehensible, intractable, threatening. Indeed, were the world to actually ever be dominated by robot overlords one may wonder if those individuals would feel that their life is any different for it.