← Back to context

Comment by zero_shift

9 days ago

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

This is a thought I want to pull on

I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli

Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems

Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them

I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.

Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).

Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated

6 comments

zero_shift

Reply
inigyou  9 days ago

I remember recently they polled workers about AI pressure: "the AI doesn't work very well, but my boss wants to see me using it." They polled the boss: "I didn't say they had to use it, they're choosing to use it and this'll look good to the executive". The executive: "well this costs a bunch but it'll look good to shareholders and we should encourage more use so it'll look even better." The shareholders: "do we look like we give a shit?"

  • FeepingCreature  9 days ago

    Out of all of them, I'd assume the shareholders to be wrong.

    Look at the state of the world. Yes, you do look like you give a shit.

    Also there's an effect here where if just 10% of shareholders care about this it still makes sense to go for it if you think you can be faster than your competition.

    • inigyou  8 days ago

      Can you name any shareholders of Microsoft who pushed for renaming Office to Copilot?

gmueckl  9 days ago

Corporations are too complex for any single person to truly control. Attention of leadership necessarily dilutes with each additional layer of management. The result is this weird corporate chaos where nobody is completely in charge because everybody has to take charge of something, however small, to progress, or the whole could accomplish nothing at all.

The result is this flailing tentacled monster where each appendix seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes littlw regard for even the other parts of its own body.