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Whilst it's interesting to imagine every company being run by the most aggressively rent seeking MBA-like AI, I don't think that will ever be the entire market.

I would guess it all comes down to risk. The future won't be uniform, it'll be poorly defused, just like then present.

People will make a value judgement on the types of corporations they want to deal with. The sort of company that no has employees will by necessity have to be very cheap compared to those that provide interactive human service.

Dealing with AI firms will be like dealing with an anonymous Chinese eBay seller. You'll effectively have no legal recourse as such and they won't discuss things but complaining might get you a replacement item or a full refund.

If it doesn't the product will have to be cheap enough to write off as a bad buy.

Let's hope cheap AI powered corps don't suck all the profit out of the market and we loose all firms capable of providing real services.

Or we end up paying for human service that's been quietly outsourced to AI much like we do for many big name manufactured goods.



Why would "the markets" provide that option? AI corporations will be phenomenally successful predatory value-extractions machines. Shareholders will vastly prefer them over more humane corporate structures.

This already happens. It's why PayPal, YouTube, Amazon, and the rest can shut down small-fry business accounts with no come-back. They're monopolies and they don't care. Because they don't need to.

The next stage will be shareholders using AI to make their investment choices. This will - automatically, with no recourse - drive money towards AI corporations while starving human-run businesses of investment.

Essentially AI is just an amplifier of existing economic and political trends - a programmable automated economic predator. Because many of those trends are dysfunctional and insane, we're going to have a lot to deal with.


> Why would "the markets" provide that option?

They'll provide it if enough people want something that's made exclusively by humans and not AI.

In a world of ubiquitous McDonalds some people still want artisanal food even if it costs more.


Depends on whether you view humane business practices as a cost-center of a value-center though - in pure economic terms.

This is an unsolved question, because when you get down to it our businesses are still run by humans, and humans haven't changed much in the last 10,000 years from when we lived in tribes in Africa and were predated by large carnivores.

Look at the utterly insane culture which develops in places like LinkedIn and tell me that all executives are making calculated decisions with no ego, just efficiency. They're not - they're clearly not.

The fear of AI capitalism is the fear that it'll do to everyone what currently is done to the working class, given the opportunity. That's a realistic fear! But it's not guaranteed, because one of the significant arguments to stop abusing workers is that when you do, they're more efficient and more productive. Consider the delta between what the data says about WFH home and the complete conviction some managers have that despite this they've got to drag people back into the office (Blizzard Entertainment is a good example of manifestly creating problems because you won't let a bad idea go on this front).


The Chinese eBay seller brought to mind the concept of the Chinese Room[0] and how it is a reflection of current LLM’s. Perhaps also influenced by a recent read of Blindsight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room




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