[WarmWash]

These mega-strong players always kill themselves and collapse. We can see this on the global geopolitical scale (which fundamentally acts as a true free market), where all the empires have always fallen.

The stressing part is when they are at their peak, so people would like to use regulation to short-cut right to the collapse part.

The only example we have a true free market victor that hasn't collapsed is humans, who have totally and completely dominated all other life on Earth, but man, it's certainly not looking good for us right now.

[tavavex]

But does that collapse happen because of some universal axiom about controlling humans, or were those empires merely limited by what was possible in their era? This is the first time in history we have so much military power, ways to exert influence that's truly world-spanning, the most sophisticated technology and the most thorough surveillance ever - all at the same time. Whatever barrier there might be, who's to say that today's megacorporations won't be able to push past it?

[WarmWash]

I'd say the axiom is that as your system becomes larger, more complex, the number of stable states it can exist in shrink. Which is something that is just generally true about systems.

We can envision a future with an ASI controlled super corporation that owns everything with omnipresent micromanagement, but then why would the ASI even bother with humans. That event right there would be our "got to powerful for our(humans) own good" moment.