| That's an Ayn Rand type black and white view of society. Not so long ago, companies were supposed to (and many did) care for continuity, in a broad sense: survival, labor, customer, and product. Nowadays, you would add environment too. Shares were a way of getting more interest than a savings account. Heck, there were even cooperations in which the laborers were shareholders as well. The word you are looking for is greed. |
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| ▲ | RandomLensman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | How could a corporation itself care about anything? How would it act itself (without humans), for example, to express such care? In my experience, it is always people. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Think in terms of a dynamic system. Or in terms of "selfish gene", as I've observed it to be easier to talk about. Any single person or group in a corporation is expendable. You can swap out the sales department or a CEO, and the corporation will continue on its course without a pause or major change of direction. No single person or group of people is in total control of the direction - what directs the corporation is the sum total of ideas, vibes, internal influences, bylaws, operating practices, assets, and external environment of competitors and markets and regulatory landscape. The people that make up a corporation may be diverse and have conflicting goals, but if there's one thing they're all aligned on, is that they all want to keep their jobs and increase their pay or influence. I.e. they want the corporation to go on, to survive at least to their next paycheck. The end result is, a corporation can be seen as an independent entity - kinda like an animal (or a super-colony for more accurate comparison) with a survival drive independent of the people that form it. | | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If there is a single owner, could shut down the place, for example. As I said, in my experience, the humans - interchangible or not, as customers, competitors, owners etc - determine what happens, not the corporation itself. Can look at a corporate as "living thing" itself, but I think that underestimates the human side. | | |
| ▲ | direwolf20 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Individual neurons determine how your arm moves, but we still speak of a human as a whole being that makes decisions. | | |
| ▲ | tgv 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Then again, there are 100 billion highly interconnected neurons without a CEO, a CFO, a CTO, a COO, etc. Thinking that from 50, 500 or even 5000 barely connected people with exterior motivation some higher intelligence can emerge is naive. Do not anthropomorphize. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > 50, 500 or even 5000 barely connected people 5000 barely connected people isn't a corporation, it's a mob. A corporation has more to it. In fact people aren't much more important that the software that runs on them. Because that's what all the bureaucracy is - all those rules and bylaws and contractual obligations and checklists and playbooks and regulation - software running on a runtime made of meat, one form letter or internal memo at a time. Most of the time, losing people is to corporation what clipping a toe nail is to an adult, or a bit flip to a modern computer - a non-event you barely notice and carry on. > higher intelligence can emerge Nobody said "higher intelligence". I mentioned animals, ant supercolonies, but the same patterns of behavior is visible in even most basic multi-cellular and single-cellular organisms. > Do not anthropomorphize. Nobody says you need to. (Except with LLMs, where refusing to do so means you'll just remain confused about what can or cannot, should or should not, be done with them.) |
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