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(Trigger warnings: another AI post; Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
I want to talk about the economy in the face of the AI revolution, but let's go back to the basics first.
What is the purpose of a company? Not the stated one, the original one.
To provide value to its shareholders? Of course not, that's a very narrow view! It's like saying armies exist to kill people.
Do companies and markets provide a decentralized way to coordinate the efforts of large groups of people (choreography vs orchestration)? Yes, but what for?
Do companies and markets exist to maximize the economic output? Many would say yes, but the idea is wrong and will become more obviously wrong the more AI we inject into the economy.
Companies and markets exist to maximize the consumption! They exist so that more people consume more goods and services! The fact that these companies have to pay their workers is not an unwanted side effect, it's a feature! Companies exist to create and distribute goods and services to humans, and markets exist to ensure that each human gets a share that is sufficiently fair.
Both the industrial revolution and the transition to a service-based economy created millions, if not billions of new jobs, but is this an inevitable consequence of free markets? Will AI-fication of the modern economy do the same?
The correct answer is not "yes" or "no". It's "mu". If the economy reinvents itself again and people of the Global North find themselves new jobs, that's fine.
But if we suddenly start running out of jobs, accepting it as the inevitability of the market forces is the wrong way out. The right way out is retiring the market forces, not submitting to them. Creating shareholder value has always been the real side effect.
I have a slightly different answer from what seems to have been offered so far. Companies, as a legal form, are a carrot-and-stick deal offered to the individual by society in order to channel his ambition into pro-social or at least less harmful ends.
The carrot are tax advantages, paperwork benefits, legal perks such as being able to claim unique use of a recognisable artificial trademark, and some degree of shielding of the individual behind the enterprise from repercussions (such as debts far in excess of what the enterprise could be expected to make up for, or legal responsibility for side effects and damages caused by it), as long as he plays by the rules.
The stick is, often, outright lawfare against individuals who pursue their ambitions without signing up to the form (in Germany for example you can not even, as a private person, make and sell software to the public without registering a company).
The means by which the goal (of channeling individual ambition to pro-social ends) is pursued are legal requirements to make the activities of the company legible in particular ways (bookkeeping, charters, records) and adhere to all sorts of restrictions on shape, purpose and behaviour. If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value", on the flip side this means that a company can not actually have the terminal value to "maximise paperclips", and there may be legal ways to mobilise society against if it appears to do the latter over the former. Also, the things that a company can command its employees to do are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with a legal contract, which are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with legally unregulated compulsion such as individual or communal violence.
The alternative to companies, the thing that there would be more of if someone erased the concept of companies from reality with a memetic Death Note, does not look like people no longer getting together to achieve things, or less consumption. It looks like more instances of things like the Mafia, cults and Genghis Khan's hordes. If you only erased companies narrowly writ, you might also (at least) get medieval guilds, which are really an older, rougher attempt at the same thing.
As far as I'm aware, there are few countries where this is actually true. Yes, it's the default but if the charter of the company says otherwise, the obligation can be something else (as long as it's legal).
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