Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

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They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit.

And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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