On Wed, Jun 5, 2019, at 15:16, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 7:56 AM Lawrence Crowell > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> *> Even if a completely libertarian system were established, the >> corporations, banks and those at their top would pretty quickly go about >> forming a government to provide a platform, a coherent set of laws etc in >> which they could effectively conduct their commerce. Of course it would be >> purely plutocratic, which in ways is not terribly different from what we >> currently have,* > > In todays world people have no choice where they get their police protection > from, they must purchase it from the government through taxes. If the police > worked for profit making corporations and every person could choose which > corporation to buy police protection from please explain to me how 40 million > Germans could murder 6 million Jews.
Private police organizations would have every incentive to merge and form monopolies, like corporations always try to do. Then suppose you are on the wrong side of such a monopoly... > > And Yes there would be disagreements between different police agencies > following different laws, but I explained in my previous post how that could > be resolved. Mostly. Corporations are AIs. In fact, they are AIs driven by a very simple utility function: profit maximization. Left to their own devices, they become an instance of Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer". We already see week versions of this taking shape, for example: - Amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles during their 12-hour shifts, so that some more plastic crap from China that nobody really needs can be delivered as quickly as possible, while we deplete fossil fuel reserves and destroy our own environment; - Google and Facebook employ some of the brightest minds of our generation to figure out ways to exploit loopholes in our brain, that we are not evolved to defend again (known as supernormal stimulus), so that we collectively waste the maximum amount of our time trapped in absurdist Skinner boxes clicking on ads, so that we develop a strong enough desire to buy said crap from China. Turns out that some of the most effective supernormal stimulus also lead to Trump and Brexit, risking the destruction of institutions that took centuries to develop. In the case of the EU, flawed as it may be, it is a miracle that it was even possible, and it led to the longest period of peace in the entire History of the European continent. Then there is the small issue of preferential attachment (aka "rich-get-richer" or Matthew effect), inexorably leading to a world where there is only one corporation that owns everything, and the rest of us are its slaves. Of course, we have been there before, and at some point heads start rolling, and back to square one we go. If something is to be learned from the XX century, is that there is no simple solution, no silver bullet. There is only one answer: education and a constant struggle for justice and freedom, always with new challenges. The more educated people are, the more they are capable of making informed and rational choices when they vote. Education and fundamental science are not possible in a world where the utility function is pure profit. Telmo. > > John K Clark > > > >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0BGixhsTH6xXVoHuL3ndsm5uLNbw49TZk1LK-VDtC%2B6A%40mail.gmail.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0BGixhsTH6xXVoHuL3ndsm5uLNbw49TZk1LK-VDtC%2B6A%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/eda6d032-e49d-4876-85b7-6f1fa7bb8b60%40www.fastmail.com.
