Samaritan's Antecedents: What was Decima?

[kwnyc]

So in its machinations to first co-opt the Machine, then boot up Samaritan, Greer was the representative of Decima, a mysterious Shanghai-based corporation. (Which, we are led to believe, no longer really exists.)

Article from the PoI wiki here.

I did some digging but can find no definitive statement as to who controlled Decima (other than Greer), or more importantly, why the corporation wanted an AI that would essentially regulate the world. Greer has been given a backstory (disaffected spy, survivor of WW II), but how does THAT guy go from being a rogue agent to controlling a corporation so powerful that it can steal powerful, top-secret computer chips and enough servers to power Samaritan?

Who bankrolls that kind of thing? And why? Corporations want LESS oversight, not more. "Ruling the world" is a supervillain's goal, not a CEO's.

Greer has a worldview in which Samaritan is the answer: let it go and do what it wants, and the world will be better because a NONhuman is running it. (Though how much of Samaritan's "personality" was created by Arthur Claypool to begin with? How much has it assimilated of Greer's thoughts and wishes? WAS Samaritan ever booted up by Claypool before the project was shelved by the US Government?)

And should Samaritan decide that it no longer needs Greer (which we've all been postulating since Samaritan booted up), will it permit Team Machine to kill him, or direct its own operatives to eliminate him (thus depriving us of a much-long-for showdown).

Opening up this can of worms 3 episodes from the end is my idea of fun.

[tessaray]

Decima/Greer/Samaritan never made much sense to me.  That said, it always appeared to me that Greer pretended to allow Samaritan to choose its own path, even as he was always there encouraging it to take the most extreme actions, without even trying to make Samaritan respect or understand human motivations. One thing that was very noticeable with Samaritan's simulations was its lack of nuanced understanding of human behavior.  It was almost like Shaw's sims with Root were mash-ups of bad romance novels and Shaw's own interactions/flirtations with her.  

Hopefully Samaritan's  underestimation of the human factor will be its downfall.