[ryandrake]

These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded.

The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.

[4ff]

Actually the ideal company is one that is a literal money machine - aka just creates money without liabilities - enabling shareholders to lay claim on the cash.

[georgeecollins]

All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism. I am not saying they are unfair, but I think you could have made the same arguments about management and investors doing the same thing in manufacturing in the US. They reduced domestic employment (not in total, but reduced the share and the growth) in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities.

If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good? It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.

[bigbadfeline]

> All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism.

These argument aren't attacks because one of the basic tenets of free market capitalism is that everyone being greedy for himself is good for everybody. So people saying that corporations care only about profit and not about higher values only reaffirm that basic tenet.

You could try to convince them that they are wrong in their desire to make corporations care about more than money but you cannot blame them for saying something that fully agrees with free market orthodoxy.

> the same arguments hold about management and investors... reducing domestic employment in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities. > If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good?

First, automaton wasn't the reason for the reduction of US manufacturing, outsourcing was. Wall Street used every leverage to push manufacturing and engineering abroad and that included outsourcing software work. At that time, both workers and engineers criticized the process, so you're factually wrong about that, twice.

Second, their criticism was right because... oh look, we have to bring it all back now, at a great expense paid for... by those same workers and engineers. Because after the big corporations got rich in China they want to come back here and own absolutely everything, including the government and continue the process of disfranchisement of the public by using AI not for higher output but as a cost and workforce reduction tool.

> It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.

This topic has nothing to do with Marxism, which you appear to be using as a smear word, purely mechanically, without any understanding. Marxism has bigger problems but let's not get sidetracked here.