Well except that corporations ultimately profit off of consumer behavior. Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism. AI has no such necessary desire.
But AI also has no innate desires at all, except what we program it to have. So profit and war are almost certainly the goals it will have.
Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.
All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto.
Money is labor hours exchanged for equivalent goods and services. It’s a loop. If there’s no one to labor, and no one to buy, money isn’t anything.
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
Why will people do things for you in exchange for money?
Have you seen the behavior of parties captured by the capitalist end of the political spectrum? They very much are not the rational actors trying to preserve their own income by keeping consumers alive. If they were they would try to optimize consumer health and spending money instead of aiming for highscore-like accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few that can’t spend it on anything meaningful any more anyway because they can already afford everything that could meaningfully improve their life a million times over.
I’m not saying capitalists as individuals do this. I am saying that capitalism as a system will ultimately do this. Capitalism survives is kinda its claim to fame. It was never going to take a long termist view and do what’s best for everyone, but it will protect itself. Whether that means government acts on its behalf, in the form of it acting on behalf of the insurance companies, or by shifting consumerism towards consuming solar panels and electric cars, it will ultimately find a way to exist. Literally no one on earth benefits from human extinction, corporate or otherwise, and eventually human decline WILL hurt sales. That’s when all the nations and corporations of the world will act. It’s bleak but true.
but it will protect itself.
Or, facing conditions where it can no longer do this, it will boil off into fascist autocracy, which seems to be where we’re headed.
Meh, a nation, just like a corporation, must protect itself. Either way, political economy will eventually “go green”. In a lot of ways it already has.
It looks more like people have to fight a constant battle to keep capitalism in check because capitalism itself is incapable of rational behavior and just does the same things to optimize profits regardless of consequences for any other indicators.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
but that won’t show in results for next quarter, si they don’t care
artificialfish@programming.dev 1 week ago
It very well might this quarter for insurance companies. It certainly did last year.
Climate change has clear economic impact now, not speculative future impact, and we can already see the finance world reacting to that in heavy handed ways.