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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

In a free market, a corporation has to please its customers in order to maximize profit.

For example, Apple.

Tobacco companies. Humans can be enticed by short team pleasing at the expense of their long term destruction.

People do a lot of things for short term pleasure that risk heavy long term consequences. Societies don't have the right to decide for others what their choices should be.

Maybe outlaw ice cream next? Or how about marijuana smoking? (Oops, already tried that.) How about loud music (long term hearing damage)? How about motorcycles?

> Societies don't have the right to decide for others what their choices should be.

If an AGI starts inventing new and wonderful ways in which we can destroy ourselves, and we are taken in by it, we will have to restrict that, it's non optional.

You can make the argument that, say, current hard drugs should be legal - but I don't think there's a way to defend the position that any possible future 'thing' should always be legal/permitted regardless of negative effect.

An awful lot of harm has been done to people via one group who are sure they know what is best for others, and thereby are justified in forcing it upon them.

In fact, likely much more harm than those with evil intent.

> in order to maximize profit

I'm wondering where this idea comes from (I'm not criticizing you specifically, but that maxim).

Do no investors value stability, longevity, ethical behavior etc?

I tend to invest in companies whose products and behavior I like. It's not terribly surprising that they've done well - pleasing customers is good business. I've dumped stock in companies that began a business model of suing their customers to make money - and those companies (again unsurprisingly) tilted down.

Buy companies that customers love, sell companies that customers do business with only because they have to.

Risk profile and time horizon are central considerations for investors, absolutely.

Sometimes a fast, go-big-or-go-home trajectory is what they're looking to invest in.

The way to put ethics in a language investors understand is to price in externalities.

In doing so it often does things that customers wouldn't like if they knew about them.

For example child labour, slave labour, destroying environment, causing cancer, etc.

Apple is a net negative in my perspective. They contribute negatively.

Nobody makes you buy an Apple product.

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