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Comment by vannevar | Hacker News Reader

The counter argument is that they actually have, but we call them corporations. Artificial quasi-sentient life forms, with superhuman powers and in many cases, rights beyond those of humans. With the rise of the internet and ecommerce, it's possible for them to transact with each other with no human intervention. Think about a whole ecosystem of DAOs.

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That is a very interesting perspective. It reminded me of the book Scale by Geoffrey West, which I've been planning to read for some time now. From what I've heard and read about it, one of the things it seems to do is examine organizations, corporations and cities as emergent complex systems that both emerge from life and appear to share many properties of life themselves.

I can still get a job working for a corporation though. Maybe not with actual robots.

I think the robot apocalypse scenario is broad enough to include humans working for our robot overlords. :-) Think of the many humans essentially indentured to corporations, working for low wages while trying to pay off enormous debt.

Meh. It beats the old days. At no point in human history have we been so comfortable.

It's hard, yes, but we only have eight hours every weekday forced out of us. That's a bit different from the past.

"It's better than it used to be" is not a valid argument against thinking about the problems of how it currently is.

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