Dude, you broke the future

I agree with a lot of that talk. What's getting us now is that corporations are getting better at maximizing shareholder value. For a long time, big companies were relatively static entities. They got into some line of business, built the necessary factories or railroad tracks or stores, and mostly stayed there. Now, some of them pivot into new businesses with agility and take over. All the "tech" businesses use roughly the same infrastructure, which you can rent from Amazon…

Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its decision making capabilities probably don't scale exponentially (or even linearly) with its…

Corporations are optimization processes. Advertising is an optimization process. Social networks are. Smartphone addiction. Political polarization. Television, mobile games, and most forms of entertainment. This prevalence, and the fact that it's not EVIL doing it but just amoral goal-directed processes, seems to me to be the key to recognizing, fighting back, and fixing society. We have to figure out some way to fight for our human values, against these optimization processes. I don't think Stross has (or claims…