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Comment by jrflo | Hacker News Reader

No large company has ever cared about anything other than the financials, this is not specific to AI.

Generalizations are embarrassing.

Companies don’t have souls or minds. Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

> Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

But companies do not care about social good, art, and other things outside of financials. A company is a generalization of sorts of all the people within the company who have influence over it's direction. 100% of people working for companies have a profit motive. That's why people work for for companies.

By that logic, 100% of professional musicians and farmers also have a profit motive. Not sure what we should conclude from that? People do truly care about a lot of other things in their work, even if it makes them money.

I'm not referring to the sum feeling of all employees, I'm referring to the actions of the company as a whole, which is largely driven by the C-suite who have a financial responsibility to investors.

Even narrowing it down to them and their actions, they still do care about many other things. You might have only seen the worst in the media.

No, you don't get to play the "everybody does that" card. These companies started out claiming to care about openness, and to have moral high ground.

Because it used to be profitable for them to say that when the only people paying attention were a niche technical audience. Now, it's no longer profitable to do so. That's what it's always been about.

This is actually not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. However a look at Henry Ford’s personal priorities shows that there’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for aspect to this (also arguably visible to a lesser extent in eg. Mark Zuckerberg’s dual-class-structure-enabled control on Facebook—and in Musk’s de facto control over his rambling empire).

I feel like this just furthers my point. Over 100 years ago a court ruled that companies have to operate primarily for the benefit of their shareholders. That is the regime we have been operating in ever since. You may get some eccentric cases like Ford or Zuckerberg from time to time when they don't operate in the interests of shareholders, but it's far from the norm.

Sadly, this has become very true during the last decades.

However, a half of century ago there were a non-negligible number of large companies for which there existed more important priorities than the financials, e.g. reputation and customer satisfaction, for instance Hewlett-Packard (which was something extremely different from those who have inherited this name).

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