[derefr]

Machines are one of the only things most people are familiar with that don't hold to all the same values that living beings (humans, other mammals, most vertebrates) usually do. (You might call Ellison a "force of nature", but that might not play well for people who attribute an "eventually-consistent omnibenevolence" to nature.)

Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.) Where human values and corporate values are in conflict, Ellison has chosen to forget about his human values and, effectively, become the avatar of the corporation's interests. He's the "ideal CEO", in about the same way as Locutus of Borg is an ideal CEO.

A better analogy for this effect, for those who understand it, would be to compare Ellison to a https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer, but that's not really that well-known a meme.

[yuhong]

I am seriously disliking the current debt-based economy now for this reason and more. There are other examples of its effects like Mozilla, Google, and VCs (I have several Twitter threads with @BrendanEich about that one). Sun and Oracle are probably worth mentioning here too, including Jonathan Schwartz.

[slavik81]

What values are shared by all mammals?

[GuiA]

Care for the young?

[noir_lord]

Their own young, a fair few species (lions come to mind) kill the young sired by other males.

[mmirate]

> Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.)

Hmm. I wonder why this augmentation is newsworthy/nontrivial/frightening. Perhaps our human frailty makes this feat truly difficult even for an average CEO?

[jimnotgym]

I suppose because (like the Paperclip Maximizer analogy mentioned in this thread) maximizing your immediate profits is not the same thing as maximizing shareholder value. It is unlikely that trying to get a professor sacked does anything but reduce your shareholder value. This kind of behavior does not make you the ultimate CEO and other humans know it, it makes you an asshole. So it's not difficult, it's just worse.

[mmirate]

Ah, so it's that only Ellison has managed to make such a PR blunder under this modification (and thusly reveal he is modified). Makes sense.

[chc]

Why is it frightening for somebody to focus solely on accumulating lucre and not to care about other people or society at all? Because hurting people is bad.

[mmirate]

In our society, hurting people is usually expensive, so it goes against the first goal unless it is done in a way which isn't expensive.