this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Well except that corporations ultimately profit off of consumer behavior. Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism. AI has no such necessary desire.
We can see this in how things like housing and medical insurance industries are suffering from climate change now. Once some other big business is losing profit because of another one exploiting, they will fight, and then the issue will be taken seriously.
But AI also has no innate desires at all, except what we program it to have. So profit and war are almost certainly the goals it will have.
but that won't show in results for next quarter, so they don't care
It very well might this quarter for insurance companies. It certainly did last year.
Climate change has clear economic impact now, not speculative future impact, and we can already see the finance world reacting to that in heavy handed ways.
Have you seen the behavior of parties captured by the capitalist end of the political spectrum? They very much are not the rational actors trying to preserve their own income by keeping consumers alive. If they were they would try to optimize consumer health and spending money instead of aiming for highscore-like accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few that can't spend it on anything meaningful any more anyway because they can already afford everything that could meaningfully improve their life a million times over.
I’m not saying capitalists as individuals do this. I am saying that capitalism as a system will ultimately do this. Capitalism survives is kinda its claim to fame. It was never going to take a long termist view and do what’s best for everyone, but it will protect itself. Whether that means government acts on its behalf, in the form of it acting on behalf of the insurance companies, or by shifting consumerism towards consuming solar panels and electric cars, it will ultimately find a way to exist. Literally no one on earth benefits from human extinction, corporate or otherwise, and eventually human decline WILL hurt sales. That’s when all the nations and corporations of the world will act. It’s bleak but true.
Or, facing conditions where it can no longer do this, it will boil off into fascist autocracy, which seems to be where we're headed.
Meh, a nation, just like a corporation, must protect itself. Either way, political economy will eventually “go green”. In a lot of ways it already has.
China is a fascist state, it’s making some of the hardest green pushes on the globe.
It looks more like people have to fight a constant battle to keep capitalism in check because capitalism itself is incapable of rational behavior and just does the same things to optimize profits regardless of consequences for any other indicators.
All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.
Money is labor hours exchanged for equivalent goods and services. It’s a loop. If there’s no one to labor, and no one to buy the products of that labor, money isn’t anything.
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
Why will people do things for you in exchange for money?
I’ve read a lot of that book. I know about the power theory of money. But the very concept of money is about power changing hands. A person who receives money now has power over someone else. Exploitation occurs when that exchanged power is less than the power the laborer put in. But there’s no way money can exist as power in a purely top down command economy. In that case, power takes a different form, like direct police action. Money as power can only exist when it can be exchanged for goods and services. That’s its gimmick as a medium of power. Other power mediums have other gimmicks.
And under that gimmick, capitalists actually do have a dialectical relationship to workers, and therefore to their means of living, their means of social reproduction, their environment. That’s Marxism.
So all money is power, but not all power is money.