[_emacsomancer_]

> While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills"

I'm assuming this is satire, since that's apparently exactly the goal of corporations.

[ben_w]

They might want 1.99e33 USD [0], but I doubt they want to literally have it in the form of “no sun, nowhere to live, no body”.

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass%20of%20solar%20sys...

[_emacsomancer_]

I know it's inconvenient not to have a body, but we've a responsibility to our share-holders.

[ithkuil]

Just print a bill of a higher denomination and make your shareholders happy without destroying the solar system!

It's not the goal, it's the consequences of the rules of the game used to reach the goal.

If our economy was based on writing poetry and corporations would compete to write the most soul enticing profound poetry or art in general, the side effect wouldn't entail the depletion of resources and ruining of the ecosystem. Surely we'd find other ways to make our fellow human life miserable, perhaps all this art will make many suffer untold pains as the meaningfullness of our existence is unraveled, or whatever.

The rules of the game are the framework. The incentives are the driving force to push things down the gradient. The consequences are hard to predict. That works for wide range of rules and incentives