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Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance

Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective good. It is a temporary social convenience. The higher that niceness exists in the social order, the greater its contemporary benefit but also, the more it masks the vulnerability of that social benefit. It matters if Sam Altman is Ghandi or Genghis Khan in a concrete way but you, as a citizen must act as if it doesn't matter. If AI poses a danger to the social good, no amount of good guy CEOs will protect us. The only thing that will is organization and direct action.

dantheman 4y ago
In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.
- majormajor 4y ago
  That's just quibbling over what "your individual rights" are; where does the line get drawn between "exercising my right" and "having my rights infringed on by the actions of another." There is no shortage of harm done by "anyone in the market" today, whether it's currently illegal and we call it "crime" instead of just a person exercising their freedom, or whether it's harm that isn't regulated today.
- 7e 4y ago
  Promoting the general welfare is literally discussed in the first paragraph of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights came later.
  - clarkmoody 4y ago
    The Constitution is just a piece of paper. For every thousand steps the Congress, regulators, and state assemblies take in the direction of tyranny, the courts claw back one or two.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- piloto_ciego 4y ago
  I don’t know that this is true. At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility. If you work at a guided bomb factory you may not be the person dropping it, but you are responsible for the destruction it causes in a small way. Also, if global warming kills us all then it is likely that the oil companies bear some responsibility for it right? Government sucks - I agree with that statement, but we shouldn’t act like corporations are appreciably less responsible.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    The market responds to need. If nobody were able to socialise the cost of going in a foreign country and killing people, there would be no war. If the government didn't steal my money against my will on threat of incarceration, there is no way in hell I'd spend my money on bullets to kill someone's son in another country.
  - fyloraspit 4y ago
    They are worse together. Achieving some fine balance of corporations may seem somewhat utopian but we are pretty far from utopia in the current day. Building a mega corporation without big government/s I would argue is basically impossible. And local level governance is more likely and potent without big government. Again though, all of that is quite hard to achieve / see how to achieve when people with existing power enjoy the status quo control more of the levers than the masses, including the ones used to influence the masses.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >I don’t know that this is true. In the 20th century governments slaughtered wholesale around 100 million of their own citizens (China, Russia, Cambodia), let alone those of other countries they killed in war. There's no measure by which the market comes anywhere near that amount of murder.
- syzarian 4y ago
  The absence of government just leads to a situation in which some group takes control of a given area. In effect government will then exist again. During the absence of government there will be chaos and rampant crime.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I'd take a local firm offering to protect me for money over one that manages the large part of a continent. The small one will redistribute my money where I live at least. Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services.
    - krapp 4y ago
      >Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services. In the absence of government, what's stopping these groups from simply joining forces into a cartel, getting some armed thugs and making you an offer you can't refuse? History suggests that to be a far more likely scenario. Oligarchy, rather than competition, is the natural state of capitalism.
- Quekid5 4y ago
  I refer you to Thomas Midgley Jr.
clarkmoody 4y ago
The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike. Democracy got us here. It cannot get us out.
- YawningAngel 4y ago
  Given that we don't have such AI technology at present, would it not be prudent for us to assume that it may not be available imminently and plan for how we can address the problem without it?
- Quekid5 4y ago
  Who do you imagine has the majority of compute power?
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike Ha, I'm OK with that as long as I get to pick the individual! I mean, an AGI under the control of some individual could indeed make them more powerful than a corporation or even a state but whether increases average individual freedom is another question.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  So long as you buy your inferencing hardware from another private party, I'd wager you're helpless against both state and corporate power.
- maxbond 4y ago
  That's not a stable equilibrium. Blogs gave individuals asymmetric control over disseminating information - it didn't last. If you don't create institutions and power structures that cement and defend some ability of individuals, it will decay as that power is usurped by whatever institutions and power structures benefit from doing so.
- rhcom2 4y ago
  > AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike What does this even mean though? Seems like hand waving that "AI" is just going to fix everything.
yafbum 4y ago
I agree that it's the government's role but I think you can look a bit beyond the law itself, which is often hard to get right, especially in very fresh new domains. Some nice behaviors can be induced by mere fear of government intervention and fear of future laws, and I think we're seeing some of that now.
bennysonething 4y ago
Though we do vote with our wallets too.
- bloodyplonker22 4y ago
  Yes, but for your own immediate benefit. People, in general, are just not trained to think long term and "for the greater good".
  - bennysonething 4y ago
    Same as voting in elections?
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  How great then that some wallets are millions of times larger than others.
dehrmann 4y ago
> Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail.
- nateabele 4y ago
  > One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail. Because that's worked out great so far? In every case I can think of, the government (usually because it's already captured) only ever serves to further exacerbate the issue.
  - mafuy 4y ago
    Seriously? You can't think of how it was useful that the government mandated that factory door must remain open to help prevent human deaths in case of a fire? You can't think of the advantages of governmental food and medicine safety obligations?
    - whiddershins 4y ago
      The government has had some wins, and it would be naive to say they haven’t. They have also had many catastrophic failures. It’s unclear whether in the end regulations trend towards net benefit, but it does seem likely that the more nebulous a problem, the harder it is for government to get it right. Or anyone, for that matter. But especially government because the feedback loop is so slow and bad.
  - liketochill 4y ago
    Has a government never prevented a merger that would have created a monopoly?
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  That's literally my point. When you want behavior that is contrary to market incentive you need laws not guilt ridden editorials.
davnicwil 4y ago
I don't know, isn't history really just a series of specific people doing concrete actions? Do you think on some level the idea of some abstract 'government' taking care of things is just a narrative we apply to make ourselves feel better? Sure individual decision makers in that government can concretely affect reality, but beyond that are we just telling a story and really nobody is 'in control'?
- invig 4y ago
  "think on some level the idea of some abstract" This! So much this! These conversations are being held at such a high level of abstraction that they don't make sense. It's one giant "feels" session.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    Right. The National Health, turn of the century sanitation, widespread vaccination and the EPA are just all about "the feels".
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      I think the parent point is that democracy is an illusion in that only few people have any real power, and the masses choosing government representatives is very different from the masses choosing policy. Did the population at large want National Health, sanitation, vaccination and the EPA? Or did a small group of people in government decide that was best for everyone. I suspect the latter, especially when looking at the National Health system that doesn’t seem to help as well as other systems. You’re right it’s not all “the feels”, but a lot is about making the population feel like they are looked after without doing much to actually look out for their best interests.
      - DubiousPusher 4y ago
        > Did the population at large want National Health, sanitation, vaccination and the EPA? Yes. Literally every one of those was very popular when it was passed. The National Health in particular continues to be popular. The EPA was passed under Nixon and he did not veto it because the feeling that the need for it was so widespread that he didn't dare.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
That's completely misguided. Consumers purchase from companies they like. Why do you think companies are all woke and virtue signalling? Because they interpreted the vocal woke minority as the voice of the country and they want to capture that market. Corporations will absolutely try to do go in order to maximise their profit. And this is ignoring private charities which get more done than any government has ever done. Collective interest is a nice concept but the government, like all large organizations, is not capable of moving in any direction. Whatever you need done, chances are someone's cousin will get a job, the job will be done poorly and the taxpayers will pay more in taxes to fix the problem again and again and again. A government can't fail and it's therefore inefficient.
- runarberg 4y ago
  Your post ignores the existence of democracies. Governments fail all the time. In a democracy failures of government will often yield a total collapse and complete replacement. If a failure is spectacular enough, these failure often come with constitutional reforms or even revolutions. In addition, democratic governments (and even many autocratic governments) have some levels of distribution of power. Your small municipal government may very well end up being absorbed into you neighboring municipality because it is more efficient. Maybe an intermediate judicial step is introduced at a county, or even country level. Governments do try, and often succeed into making your freedom and your interaction with society at large as efficient as possible, while trying to maximize your happiness. (Although I’ll admit way to often democratic governments do act in a way that maximized the profits of the wealthy class more then your happiness).
atmosx 4y ago
If we could connect social responsibility with the stock, it would matter a great deal :-)
josephg 4y ago
Why not both? I agree government is useful and needed sometimes. But laws are slow, blunt instruments. Governments can’t micromanage every decision companies make. And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved. The government moves slowly. When AGI is invented (and I’m increasingly convinced it’ll happen in the next decade or two), what comes next will not be decided by a creaky federal government full of old people who don’t understand the technology. The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  >The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge. Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out into the open world and further step up their internal efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions. Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in where they end up.
  - startupsfail 4y ago
    What if I told you, there is this startup that is working on really effective ways of proliferating plutonium. And that it is under pressure to keep the hype, so there isn’t much time to organize the storage of proliferated materials. And the thinking is that even if it explodes, since startup is not building a bomb, it can’t really make that much damage. Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup that had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium. Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
whiddershins 4y ago
The problem is that I don’t believe we have any organization in government currently staffed and active that I trust to take any action that will benefit the public at large. The problem space is too confusing, and the people making decisions are too incompetent. It’s a huge skills and knowledge gap. And that’s without factoring in corruption and bad intentions.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Sure but in my country (USA) the government is hopelessly inept at regulating technology. We still don’t have privacy regulations and now to work around this they’re trying to ban specific foreign apps instead of protecting us from all apps! I’d honestly be horrified if they tried to regulate AI. They would be in bed with Facebook and Microsoft and they’d somehow write legislation that only serves to insulate those companies from legal repercussions instead of doing anything to protect regular people. As far as I can tell it is the view of congress that big tech can to whatever they want to us as long as the government gets a piece.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Agreed. The US has backslidden since the 20th century back towards an elitest Republic and away from democracy. But even in the US, collective action has a better track record than "altruism".
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if the back slide narrative is really accurate, or if we’re looking back at the myth of history rather than the facts. When the country was founded, only white men could vote and people of color were legally property with no rights. That’s obviously not democracy, so I question at what point after that but before today we really had democracy to have slid back from.
    - bugglebeetle 4y ago
      When we realize it’s really only about from the 1970s that we had full enfranchisement and political participation of all citizens, this becomes more obvious. “Coincidentally,” this enfranchisement was followed by the Volker shock and then the Reagan administration, both of which led to the decimation of labor’s political power and share of the economic pie.
    - DubiousPusher 4y ago
      Think of democracy as multivariable. One variable is the percentage of the population that are enfranchised. The other is how responsive the political, legal and economic systems are to the needs of everyday people. America started as an elitest Republic. Slowly, variable #1 grew and shrank in fits in starts but variable #2 changed very little. Until we get to the 1930s and then variable #2 explodes wide open. Then in 1960s variable #1 breaks wide open as well. By the 70s we are probably at the high point of both. Since then #1 has significantly eroded. And now with the court punches at the voting rights act #2 is now under threat as well. I don't mean it in the usual internet guy sense. I don't see America as having a pure past. I believe America was an elitest Republic with very slow steps towards democracy. To me America only turned the corner towards becoming a democracy in the 1930s. It was a bumpy up and down from there with a slump in the last 40 years.
erlend_sh 4y ago
The market should absolutely be looking after the collective interest. That’s what the we the collective created the market for in the first place!
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  The market will follow its inceotives. You shape those incentives with laws. If you want a market that allows people to take risks, you do that by inventing the limit liability corporation not by telling people to be nice and to not pursue their debts unto their debtors' personal property. If you want a market that discourages monopoly you do that by regulating combination not by writing articles about how "good businessmen" don't act anticompetitively.
- ip26 4y ago
  That requires you to view the free market as a tool to be wielded rather than a gospel to be followed.
merlinoa 4y ago
This is socialist nonsense. The government won't protect anything outside of their interests[0]. Free markets are good and necessary for human flourishing[1]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserve/dp/091298645X https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614273545 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614...
hackerlight 4y ago
> This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations Sam Altman says the opposite of what you're insinuating, if by "virtue wanking CEO deceiving people" you are referring to the subject of the article, Sam Altman. He says he wants a global regulatory framework enacted by government and decided upon democratically.
AussieWog93 4y ago
This is a really cynical take. CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  If unelected CEOs have more power than the democratically elected government, we aren't in a democracy. That's the problem.
- jcz_nz 4y ago
  CEO's and companies can act ethically while that aligns with the interest of the shareholders. Reality is that at some point, this becomes impossible even for those with the best intentions. "Do no evil" rings any bells?
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    To be fair, Google has done a lot of shitty things, annoying things, short-sighted things, even unfair things. But I can't, offhand, think of anything "evil." Like, we're purposely going to fuck with this guy (or group). Examples?
- sbarre 4y ago
  History proves that we have way more CEOs and companies acting out of self-interest, against the common good, than otherwise. So yeah, they should, but they don't.
- LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
  > CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. I can and should always drive the speed limit. But that doesn't mean I do, which is why highway patrol exists, to keep people in check. "Should" is such a worthless word when it comes to these discussions because if you believe that an executive needs to act a certain way but you don't believe it enough that some sort of check is placed on them, then you must not believe in importance of their good behavior that strongly.
deltree7 4y ago
chatGPT, like Google search has essentially democratized knowledge and wisdom to every human on planet earth. OTOH, it's the governments that have banned it. Do you think the citizen's of Italy are better off because of chatGPT? Corporations are more benevolent than government
m3kw9 4y ago
It’s all about risk and rewards, nobody who owns openai is going say let’s pause. It also never stopped the country that first invented nuclear bomb, sure they could paus and then Russia would have done it and would have it first, and then said “thanks for pausing”
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I don't know why people think nukes are a good example here. Nukes were outright birthed within the government within that government at its height of intervention into the market, at the height of its reach into the daily lives of every American, at the height of American civic engagement. Policy makers spent a huge amount of time creating a framework for them. Specifically there was a huge debate about whether they should be under the direct control of the military. The careful decision to place them in civilian control under the Department of Energy is probably part of the reason they haven't been unleashed since.
bcrosby95 4y ago
This is kinda weird. It's not illegal to be an asshole. You also don't want to live in a country where it's illegal to be an asshole. You also don't want to live in a country where everyone is constantly an asshole. What are you actually asking for here? Have you thought through the implications of what you're saying here? The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them. But then there's people like you saying we can't expect anything better from certain kinds of assholes. Well, yeah, when you tell an asshole to keep on being an asshole, what do you expect.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  I think society has to figure out how much power you give one person or a small group of people. whether it's an emperor, chairman, priest, a CEO, a guru, etc.
- serf 4y ago
  >What are you actually asking for here? Sounds like they're asking for government to take the reins w.r.t world impacting decisions rather than relying on the fortune of the big people in tech to make kind, thoughtful and well-planned decisions for our collective humanities' future. >The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them. No, I don't, I avoid them -- and I find that tactic that you mentioned embraced more and more commonly and purported even as the preferred method as if that's just the common sense reaction -- It's not, and I disagree with that behavior vehemently .
- jamilton 4y ago
  They're saying that companies are much more likely to be consistently ethical if they're forced to by the government, assuming the regulations that the government makes are themselves ethical. Even if you accept that Sam Altman, or any CEO, has the people's best interests at heart, it doesn't matter, the people shouldn't have depend on the CEOs of a powerful companies being a nice people to ensure they're not harmed. They're not saying it should be illegal to be an asshole, they're saying it should be illegal to run your company unethically.
gnramires 4y ago
While I don't disagree that having mostly good people generally isn't effective in long term security against all evil people, I also dispute the main claim somewhat. > Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. That's the thing: our government, society, is simply an emergent, collective agent of individuals. If most people don't actually have in mind the importance of altruism, then the whole thing doesn't work: (a) The government can't watch our every little move (as-is); (b) The more the government watches us, the more risks we take with authoritarianism (even totalitarianism); (c) Having everyone extremely social-good disinterested is extremely inefficient: you increase policing costs, legal costs, regulatory costs, it increases complexity arbitrarily and makes the whole thing grind to a halt (see highly corrupt cultures); (d) Moreover, the disinterest becomes dangerous because even if the mission of the government were to steer social-good disinterested parties to somehow achieve collective good societies (whose success I question), a disinterested population doesn't care to vote for well-meaning politicians, and doesn't have the ethical and social understanding to make good choices in this area. And then when the whole culture is social-good disinterested, it's hard to imagine somehow all government workers would be magically pro-social angels, and not as corrupt as the rest of the population. In conclusion, the entire backbone of a society is ethical enlightenment (of course, alongside other things like effectiveness, and ethical effectiveness). If individuals themselves are not ethically enlightened, no social good outcomes are possible, be it from governments, markets, or various organizations like non-profits and coops. I think the market would be looking after our collective interest if this enlightenment was more widespread. And then we could better discuss mechanisms (and general structural innovations -- which I think are very important) to keep the few inevitable problem cases and unenlightened psychopaths from ruining it for the rest of us :) In a way, societies are made of goodness (cooperation).
IAmNotACellist 4y ago
The government can't even execute on a bipartisan motivation to ban Tik-Tok. They get greedy and draft the bill to strip away all rights of citizens to have any digital privacy or VPNs, and to give themselves the power to declare any app illegal at any time. The market can't save us, and the federal government definitely can't.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It is difficult to shake the suspicion that the advocates of banning TikTok are using it as pretext for their real goals. It wouldn't be so terrible if their real goals were limited to just restricting social media in general, but beyond that... The real benefit of having a Congress for broader society is that it forces at least partial exposure of these unmentioned goals. In that sense the federal government is a wonderful invention, but the drawbacks are so many that it doesn't seem all that wonderful overall.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  The government can't even move on the fact we unnecessarily change the clocks twice a year. It's the 21st Century and werewe're still "motivated" by an 19th Century concept.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
It's not the job of the government, it's the job of citizens. Citizens MAY outsource parts of this to governments, but we primarily need labor and the working class to have the majority of economic power. https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas-what-anarcho-syndicalism https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas... I'm dedicating my life to building for-profit commercial cooperatives based on this simple principle of voluntary association.
- ajross 4y ago
  > It's not the job of the government, it's the job of citizens If only there was a system of government designed from first principles to reflect the will of the people... This is just librarian tautology. It's not wrong, but any "citizen" organization you can imagine to implement whatever policy it is you want[1] is going to be isomorphic to a democratic government. [1] You skipped this part!
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    The government looks after its own interests. That is what an institution does. A government isn't different than a corporation or any other organization this way. Delegating powers to a government for the common good does not change any of this. The people still have the job of ensuring the government carries that out properly because its priority is and always will be foremost itself, so the people have to ensure the government's interests coincide with their own. A government is not just some will-of-the-people-reflecting automaton that you can put in place then wash your hands of.
    - sergiomattei 4y ago
      So does the private sector. At least the public has some say in governance. Who wins?
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        So does the private sector what? Did you only read and respond to the first sentence of my comment? I can't figure out what you're responding to.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
If you're talking about the US (Fed) government then please don't hold your breath. They're not interested in the best interests of the many. They're too busy rubbing each other, counting their money and deflecting the blame elsewhere. Will the act on AI? Yeah, probably. Will it smell of crony capitalism? Yes, absolutely.
artificialLimbs 4y ago
>> The higher that niceness exists in the social order, the greater its contemporary benefit Could also be said that the more niceness, the more likely that not-nice actors will violently overthrow the nice ones. As an example, we have had numerous bee hives at our place. The bees that never mess with us when we come near their hives are more likely to get robbed by another hive and destroyed. The bees that would sting us when we came near were rock solid - they never got robbed or collapsed.
arnavk 4y ago
It's Gandhi not Ghandi

dantheman 4y ago

In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.

majormajor 4y ago
That's just quibbling over what "your individual rights" are; where does the line get drawn between "exercising my right" and "having my rights infringed on by the actions of another." There is no shortage of harm done by "anyone in the market" today, whether it's currently illegal and we call it "crime" instead of just a person exercising their freedom, or whether it's harm that isn't regulated today.
7e 4y ago
Promoting the general welfare is literally discussed in the first paragraph of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights came later.
- clarkmoody 4y ago
  The Constitution is just a piece of paper. For every thousand steps the Congress, regulators, and state assemblies take in the direction of tyranny, the courts claw back one or two.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
piloto_ciego 4y ago
I don’t know that this is true. At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility. If you work at a guided bomb factory you may not be the person dropping it, but you are responsible for the destruction it causes in a small way. Also, if global warming kills us all then it is likely that the oil companies bear some responsibility for it right? Government sucks - I agree with that statement, but we shouldn’t act like corporations are appreciably less responsible.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  The market responds to need. If nobody were able to socialise the cost of going in a foreign country and killing people, there would be no war. If the government didn't steal my money against my will on threat of incarceration, there is no way in hell I'd spend my money on bullets to kill someone's son in another country.
- fyloraspit 4y ago
  They are worse together. Achieving some fine balance of corporations may seem somewhat utopian but we are pretty far from utopia in the current day. Building a mega corporation without big government/s I would argue is basically impossible. And local level governance is more likely and potent without big government. Again though, all of that is quite hard to achieve / see how to achieve when people with existing power enjoy the status quo control more of the levers than the masses, including the ones used to influence the masses.
- logicchains 4y ago
  >I don’t know that this is true. In the 20th century governments slaughtered wholesale around 100 million of their own citizens (China, Russia, Cambodia), let alone those of other countries they killed in war. There's no measure by which the market comes anywhere near that amount of murder.
syzarian 4y ago
The absence of government just leads to a situation in which some group takes control of a given area. In effect government will then exist again. During the absence of government there will be chaos and rampant crime.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I'd take a local firm offering to protect me for money over one that manages the large part of a continent. The small one will redistribute my money where I live at least. Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services.
  - krapp 4y ago
    >Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services. In the absence of government, what's stopping these groups from simply joining forces into a cartel, getting some armed thugs and making you an offer you can't refuse? History suggests that to be a far more likely scenario. Oligarchy, rather than competition, is the natural state of capitalism.
Quekid5 4y ago
I refer you to Thomas Midgley Jr.

clarkmoody 4y ago

The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike. Democracy got us here. It cannot get us out.

YawningAngel 4y ago
Given that we don't have such AI technology at present, would it not be prudent for us to assume that it may not be available imminently and plan for how we can address the problem without it?
Quekid5 4y ago
Who do you imagine has the majority of compute power?
joe_the_user 4y ago
The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike Ha, I'm OK with that as long as I get to pick the individual! I mean, an AGI under the control of some individual could indeed make them more powerful than a corporation or even a state but whether increases average individual freedom is another question.
smoldesu 4y ago
So long as you buy your inferencing hardware from another private party, I'd wager you're helpless against both state and corporate power.
maxbond 4y ago
That's not a stable equilibrium. Blogs gave individuals asymmetric control over disseminating information - it didn't last. If you don't create institutions and power structures that cement and defend some ability of individuals, it will decay as that power is usurped by whatever institutions and power structures benefit from doing so.
rhcom2 4y ago
> AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike What does this even mean though? Seems like hand waving that "AI" is just going to fix everything.

yafbum 4y ago

I agree that it's the government's role but I think you can look a bit beyond the law itself, which is often hard to get right, especially in very fresh new domains. Some nice behaviors can be induced by mere fear of government intervention and fear of future laws, and I think we're seeing some of that now.

bennysonething 4y ago

Though we do vote with our wallets too.

bloodyplonker22 4y ago
Yes, but for your own immediate benefit. People, in general, are just not trained to think long term and "for the greater good".
- bennysonething 4y ago
  Same as voting in elections?
avgcorrection 4y ago
How great then that some wallets are millions of times larger than others.

dehrmann 4y ago

> Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail.

nateabele 4y ago
> One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail. Because that's worked out great so far? In every case I can think of, the government (usually because it's already captured) only ever serves to further exacerbate the issue.
- mafuy 4y ago
  Seriously? You can't think of how it was useful that the government mandated that factory door must remain open to help prevent human deaths in case of a fire? You can't think of the advantages of governmental food and medicine safety obligations?
  - whiddershins 4y ago
    The government has had some wins, and it would be naive to say they haven’t. They have also had many catastrophic failures. It’s unclear whether in the end regulations trend towards net benefit, but it does seem likely that the more nebulous a problem, the harder it is for government to get it right. Or anyone, for that matter. But especially government because the feedback loop is so slow and bad.
- liketochill 4y ago
  Has a government never prevented a merger that would have created a monopoly?
DubiousPusher 4y ago
That's literally my point. When you want behavior that is contrary to market incentive you need laws not guilt ridden editorials.

davnicwil 4y ago

I don't know, isn't history really just a series of specific people doing concrete actions? Do you think on some level the idea of some abstract 'government' taking care of things is just a narrative we apply to make ourselves feel better? Sure individual decision makers in that government can concretely affect reality, but beyond that are we just telling a story and really nobody is 'in control'?

invig 4y ago
"think on some level the idea of some abstract" This! So much this! These conversations are being held at such a high level of abstraction that they don't make sense. It's one giant "feels" session.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Right. The National Health, turn of the century sanitation, widespread vaccination and the EPA are just all about "the feels".
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    I think the parent point is that democracy is an illusion in that only few people have any real power, and the masses choosing government representatives is very different from the masses choosing policy. Did the population at large want National Health, sanitation, vaccination and the EPA? Or did a small group of people in government decide that was best for everyone. I suspect the latter, especially when looking at the National Health system that doesn’t seem to help as well as other systems. You’re right it’s not all “the feels”, but a lot is about making the population feel like they are looked after without doing much to actually look out for their best interests.
    - DubiousPusher 4y ago
      > Did the population at large want National Health, sanitation, vaccination and the EPA? Yes. Literally every one of those was very popular when it was passed. The National Health in particular continues to be popular. The EPA was passed under Nixon and he did not veto it because the feeling that the need for it was so widespread that he didn't dare.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

That's completely misguided. Consumers purchase from companies they like. Why do you think companies are all woke and virtue signalling? Because they interpreted the vocal woke minority as the voice of the country and they want to capture that market. Corporations will absolutely try to do go in order to maximise their profit. And this is ignoring private charities which get more done than any government has ever done. Collective interest is a nice concept but the government, like all large organizations, is not capable of moving in any direction. Whatever you need done, chances are someone's cousin will get a job, the job will be done poorly and the taxpayers will pay more in taxes to fix the problem again and again and again. A government can't fail and it's therefore inefficient.

runarberg 4y ago
Your post ignores the existence of democracies. Governments fail all the time. In a democracy failures of government will often yield a total collapse and complete replacement. If a failure is spectacular enough, these failure often come with constitutional reforms or even revolutions. In addition, democratic governments (and even many autocratic governments) have some levels of distribution of power. Your small municipal government may very well end up being absorbed into you neighboring municipality because it is more efficient. Maybe an intermediate judicial step is introduced at a county, or even country level. Governments do try, and often succeed into making your freedom and your interaction with society at large as efficient as possible, while trying to maximize your happiness. (Although I’ll admit way to often democratic governments do act in a way that maximized the profits of the wealthy class more then your happiness).

atmosx 4y ago

If we could connect social responsibility with the stock, it would matter a great deal :-)

josephg 4y ago

Why not both? I agree government is useful and needed sometimes. But laws are slow, blunt instruments. Governments can’t micromanage every decision companies make. And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved. The government moves slowly. When AGI is invented (and I’m increasingly convinced it’ll happen in the next decade or two), what comes next will not be decided by a creaky federal government full of old people who don’t understand the technology. The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
>The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge. Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out into the open world and further step up their internal efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions. Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in where they end up.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  What if I told you, there is this startup that is working on really effective ways of proliferating plutonium. And that it is under pressure to keep the hype, so there isn’t much time to organize the storage of proliferated materials. And the thinking is that even if it explodes, since startup is not building a bomb, it can’t really make that much damage. Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup that had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium. Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.
- andsoitis 4y ago

whiddershins 4y ago

The problem is that I don’t believe we have any organization in government currently staffed and active that I trust to take any action that will benefit the public at large. The problem space is too confusing, and the people making decisions are too incompetent. It’s a huge skills and knowledge gap. And that’s without factoring in corruption and bad intentions.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Sure but in my country (USA) the government is hopelessly inept at regulating technology. We still don’t have privacy regulations and now to work around this they’re trying to ban specific foreign apps instead of protecting us from all apps! I’d honestly be horrified if they tried to regulate AI. They would be in bed with Facebook and Microsoft and they’d somehow write legislation that only serves to insulate those companies from legal repercussions instead of doing anything to protect regular people. As far as I can tell it is the view of congress that big tech can to whatever they want to us as long as the government gets a piece.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
Agreed. The US has backslidden since the 20th century back towards an elitest Republic and away from democracy. But even in the US, collective action has a better track record than "altruism".
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if the back slide narrative is really accurate, or if we’re looking back at the myth of history rather than the facts. When the country was founded, only white men could vote and people of color were legally property with no rights. That’s obviously not democracy, so I question at what point after that but before today we really had democracy to have slid back from.
  - bugglebeetle 4y ago
    When we realize it’s really only about from the 1970s that we had full enfranchisement and political participation of all citizens, this becomes more obvious. “Coincidentally,” this enfranchisement was followed by the Volker shock and then the Reagan administration, both of which led to the decimation of labor’s political power and share of the economic pie.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    Think of democracy as multivariable. One variable is the percentage of the population that are enfranchised. The other is how responsive the political, legal and economic systems are to the needs of everyday people. America started as an elitest Republic. Slowly, variable #1 grew and shrank in fits in starts but variable #2 changed very little. Until we get to the 1930s and then variable #2 explodes wide open. Then in 1960s variable #1 breaks wide open as well. By the 70s we are probably at the high point of both. Since then #1 has significantly eroded. And now with the court punches at the voting rights act #2 is now under threat as well. I don't mean it in the usual internet guy sense. I don't see America as having a pure past. I believe America was an elitest Republic with very slow steps towards democracy. To me America only turned the corner towards becoming a democracy in the 1930s. It was a bumpy up and down from there with a slump in the last 40 years.

erlend_sh 4y ago

The market should absolutely be looking after the collective interest. That’s what the we the collective created the market for in the first place!

DubiousPusher 4y ago
The market will follow its inceotives. You shape those incentives with laws. If you want a market that allows people to take risks, you do that by inventing the limit liability corporation not by telling people to be nice and to not pursue their debts unto their debtors' personal property. If you want a market that discourages monopoly you do that by regulating combination not by writing articles about how "good businessmen" don't act anticompetitively.
ip26 4y ago
That requires you to view the free market as a tool to be wielded rather than a gospel to be followed.

merlinoa 4y ago

This is socialist nonsense. The government won't protect anything outside of their interests[0]. Free markets are good and necessary for human flourishing[1]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserve/dp/091298645X https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614273545 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614...

hackerlight 4y ago

> This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations Sam Altman says the opposite of what you're insinuating, if by "virtue wanking CEO deceiving people" you are referring to the subject of the article, Sam Altman. He says he wants a global regulatory framework enacted by government and decided upon democratically.

AussieWog93 4y ago

This is a really cynical take. CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.

jasonhansel 4y ago
If unelected CEOs have more power than the democratically elected government, we aren't in a democracy. That's the problem.
jcz_nz 4y ago
CEO's and companies can act ethically while that aligns with the interest of the shareholders. Reality is that at some point, this becomes impossible even for those with the best intentions. "Do no evil" rings any bells?
- listenallyall 4y ago
  To be fair, Google has done a lot of shitty things, annoying things, short-sighted things, even unfair things. But I can't, offhand, think of anything "evil." Like, we're purposely going to fuck with this guy (or group). Examples?
sbarre 4y ago
History proves that we have way more CEOs and companies acting out of self-interest, against the common good, than otherwise. So yeah, they should, but they don't.
LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
> CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. I can and should always drive the speed limit. But that doesn't mean I do, which is why highway patrol exists, to keep people in check. "Should" is such a worthless word when it comes to these discussions because if you believe that an executive needs to act a certain way but you don't believe it enough that some sort of check is placed on them, then you must not believe in importance of their good behavior that strongly.

deltree7 4y ago

chatGPT, like Google search has essentially democratized knowledge and wisdom to every human on planet earth. OTOH, it's the governments that have banned it. Do you think the citizen's of Italy are better off because of chatGPT? Corporations are more benevolent than government

m3kw9 4y ago

It’s all about risk and rewards, nobody who owns openai is going say let’s pause. It also never stopped the country that first invented nuclear bomb, sure they could paus and then Russia would have done it and would have it first, and then said “thanks for pausing”

DubiousPusher 4y ago
I don't know why people think nukes are a good example here. Nukes were outright birthed within the government within that government at its height of intervention into the market, at the height of its reach into the daily lives of every American, at the height of American civic engagement. Policy makers spent a huge amount of time creating a framework for them. Specifically there was a huge debate about whether they should be under the direct control of the military. The careful decision to place them in civilian control under the Department of Energy is probably part of the reason they haven't been unleashed since.

bcrosby95 4y ago

This is kinda weird. It's not illegal to be an asshole. You also don't want to live in a country where it's illegal to be an asshole. You also don't want to live in a country where everyone is constantly an asshole. What are you actually asking for here? Have you thought through the implications of what you're saying here? The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them. But then there's people like you saying we can't expect anything better from certain kinds of assholes. Well, yeah, when you tell an asshole to keep on being an asshole, what do you expect.

sharemywin 4y ago
I think society has to figure out how much power you give one person or a small group of people. whether it's an emperor, chairman, priest, a CEO, a guru, etc.
serf 4y ago
>What are you actually asking for here? Sounds like they're asking for government to take the reins w.r.t world impacting decisions rather than relying on the fortune of the big people in tech to make kind, thoughtful and well-planned decisions for our collective humanities' future. >The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them. No, I don't, I avoid them -- and I find that tactic that you mentioned embraced more and more commonly and purported even as the preferred method as if that's just the common sense reaction -- It's not, and I disagree with that behavior vehemently .
jamilton 4y ago
They're saying that companies are much more likely to be consistently ethical if they're forced to by the government, assuming the regulations that the government makes are themselves ethical. Even if you accept that Sam Altman, or any CEO, has the people's best interests at heart, it doesn't matter, the people shouldn't have depend on the CEOs of a powerful companies being a nice people to ensure they're not harmed. They're not saying it should be illegal to be an asshole, they're saying it should be illegal to run your company unethically.

gnramires 4y ago

While I don't disagree that having mostly good people generally isn't effective in long term security against all evil people, I also dispute the main claim somewhat. > Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. That's the thing: our government, society, is simply an emergent, collective agent of individuals. If most people don't actually have in mind the importance of altruism, then the whole thing doesn't work: (a) The government can't watch our every little move (as-is); (b) The more the government watches us, the more risks we take with authoritarianism (even totalitarianism); (c) Having everyone extremely social-good disinterested is extremely inefficient: you increase policing costs, legal costs, regulatory costs, it increases complexity arbitrarily and makes the whole thing grind to a halt (see highly corrupt cultures); (d) Moreover, the disinterest becomes dangerous because even if the mission of the government were to steer social-good disinterested parties to somehow achieve collective good societies (whose success I question), a disinterested population doesn't care to vote for well-meaning politicians, and doesn't have the ethical and social understanding to make good choices in this area. And then when the whole culture is social-good disinterested, it's hard to imagine somehow all government workers would be magically pro-social angels, and not as corrupt as the rest of the population. In conclusion, the entire backbone of a society is ethical enlightenment (of course, alongside other things like effectiveness, and ethical effectiveness). If individuals themselves are not ethically enlightened, no social good outcomes are possible, be it from governments, markets, or various organizations like non-profits and coops. I think the market would be looking after our collective interest if this enlightenment was more widespread. And then we could better discuss mechanisms (and general structural innovations -- which I think are very important) to keep the few inevitable problem cases and unenlightened psychopaths from ruining it for the rest of us :) In a way, societies are made of goodness (cooperation).

IAmNotACellist 4y ago

The government can't even execute on a bipartisan motivation to ban Tik-Tok. They get greedy and draft the bill to strip away all rights of citizens to have any digital privacy or VPNs, and to give themselves the power to declare any app illegal at any time. The market can't save us, and the federal government definitely can't.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
It is difficult to shake the suspicion that the advocates of banning TikTok are using it as pretext for their real goals. It wouldn't be so terrible if their real goals were limited to just restricting social media in general, but beyond that... The real benefit of having a Congress for broader society is that it forces at least partial exposure of these unmentioned goals. In that sense the federal government is a wonderful invention, but the drawbacks are so many that it doesn't seem all that wonderful overall.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
The government can't even move on the fact we unnecessarily change the clocks twice a year. It's the 21st Century and werewe're still "motivated" by an 19th Century concept.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

It's not the job of the government, it's the job of citizens. Citizens MAY outsource parts of this to governments, but we primarily need labor and the working class to have the majority of economic power. https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas-what-anarcho-syndicalism https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas... I'm dedicating my life to building for-profit commercial cooperatives based on this simple principle of voluntary association.

ajross 4y ago
> It's not the job of the government, it's the job of citizens If only there was a system of government designed from first principles to reflect the will of the people... This is just librarian tautology. It's not wrong, but any "citizen" organization you can imagine to implement whatever policy it is you want[1] is going to be isomorphic to a democratic government. [1] You skipped this part!
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  The government looks after its own interests. That is what an institution does. A government isn't different than a corporation or any other organization this way. Delegating powers to a government for the common good does not change any of this. The people still have the job of ensuring the government carries that out properly because its priority is and always will be foremost itself, so the people have to ensure the government's interests coincide with their own. A government is not just some will-of-the-people-reflecting automaton that you can put in place then wash your hands of.
  - sergiomattei 4y ago
    So does the private sector. At least the public has some say in governance. Who wins?
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      So does the private sector what? Did you only read and respond to the first sentence of my comment? I can't figure out what you're responding to.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

If you're talking about the US (Fed) government then please don't hold your breath. They're not interested in the best interests of the many. They're too busy rubbing each other, counting their money and deflecting the blame elsewhere. Will the act on AI? Yeah, probably. Will it smell of crony capitalism? Yes, absolutely.

artificialLimbs 4y ago

>> The higher that niceness exists in the social order, the greater its contemporary benefit Could also be said that the more niceness, the more likely that not-nice actors will violently overthrow the nice ones. As an example, we have had numerous bee hives at our place. The bees that never mess with us when we come near their hives are more likely to get robbed by another hive and destroyed. The bees that would sting us when we came near were rock solid - they never got robbed or collapsed.

arnavk 4y ago

It's Gandhi not Ghandi