Well, then we could just set a global minimum income tax. However... there's a great problem with this proposal. We're decreasing individual agency and increas

Well, then we could just set a global minimum income tax. However... there's a great problem with this proposal. We're decreasing individual agency and increasing corporate agency. Corporations are massive evolutionary self-defending systems. As this kind of system, they don't fundamentally care (i.e. their survival and reward isn't directly connected) about the wellbeing of their employees or the general population; their success doesn't mean success of employees or our progress as a society. Think about how our bodies don't really regard the wellbeing of our cells (only that they do their jobs to sustain what we do care about) -- and of course that's fine because cells don't think (individually). Since corporations are non-conscious as individual entities (as far as I can tell), they don't have a well-defined wellbeing we should care for, unlike their employees and the population at large. In this sense, they can indeed be seen as AGI overlords fighting with us. If they could replace humans with non-questioning (and without consciousness or well-defined wellbeing) robots they wouldn't bat an eye, as entities. I call this The Great Problem of Consciousness: there are a great many of (abstract) forces and incentives in the Universe, and almost none of them care about the only thing that really matters, the Collective Conscious experience. Profit, nationalism, bureaucracy, authoritarianism, entropy, natural selection, energy gradients, and so on. None of that really cares about our experience (well being), yet they are the major driving forces of the Universe. The great battle is to try to align those gargantuan monsters into our own service. We only have control now because of the precarious situation where: Power ~ Intelligence ~ Consciousness Any variations in this condition will risk to topple humanity (in the sense of conscious individuals with good experience of life), unless we can systematically prevent it (before it prevents us). It's not quite it, but a similar concept is Scott Alexander's Moloch[1]. I'm studying ways to defeat this opponent (if anyone is interested, I hereby invite you to join in!). [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/