The opposite for me. Corporation have naked greed as their driving motivation, but that usually doesn't involve killing off all of their customers. That would be quite unprofitable.
People elected to government often seem to seek power for powers sake and I have less faith that they'll not harm us.
I think these "you can trust greed" arguments tend to short change all the benefits of government sponsored research. There's been a lot of good that's come of it.
Don't get me wrong, corps have brought good as well, but saying one is necessarily better than the other is just betraying political leanings more than providing sound arguments.
Short term local CO2 isn’t the only environmental concern. What’s missing from these discussions is Germany’s early and extremely expensive investment in solar is a large part of why it’s become so cheap.
So it’s possible for a rational environmentalist to acknowledge the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear and decide subsidizing nuclear is a poor investment vs other options. Since 2010 Germany reduced coal production by 82 TWh while also reducing Nuclear by 104 TWh. Oil -7 TWh and gas + 6TWh effectively canceled out for a net of -83 TWh from fossil fuels.
That seems to pale in comparison to what governments have done.
Doing more to stem the growth in CO2 emissions would have reduced the magnitude of the change in the climate, and with it, the harmful effects of that change, but it would also have reduced the benefits that oil and gas have conferred upon the world, in raising incomes and reducing poverty worldwide.
The difference between a government and a corporation is the ability to use violence. A government is just a corporation with a monopoly on violence (police, military, jails...). The structure of how people are organized is more significant. Are we talking about a dictatorship or a functioning democracy? Are we discussing a non-profit or a publicly listed company?
Corporations have a profit motive, governments theoretically may not. Also, read about the history of the East India Company. In no way do corporations abstain from using violence, historically, and at times they have held a du jour monopoly on the use of it.
Governments have murdered over one hundred million people over the last few centuries through war and forced famines. Corporations don't even enter that conversation given the scale difference.
Napoleon's government alone murdered more people than all corporations combined have throughout all of history. And that's a revered historical figure that routinely gets fawning movies made about him, there are obviously worse examples. Mao's government murdered several times more than Napoleon did.
I sure see a lot of power for power’s sake inside of companies.
OpenAI’s stated mission is AGI that can replace half the population in “economically valuable” work.
I get that with some creativity you can see that as a net benefit for humanity, but across at least a generation that’s going to be a rough & destabilizing transition.
Creativity doesn't come into it; the idea of jobs being lost is folk economics that no labor economist believes is possible. So all this shows is that they were founded by amateur AI doomers. We already knew that though.
There is one person out there who decides if you have a job and it's not anyone working on AI. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Except governments don’t currently go do war on behalf of the citizens or for protection of the “homeland.” They go to war “overseas” on behalf of the corporations that employ citizens that vote certain ways, in order to maintain the current global structure of US political dominion.
I know because I served as an officer in one of those wars on behalf of the United States (among other things that were also not beneficial to citizens). That had absolutely nothing to do with protecting US citizens directly.
It was chiefly about maintaining petro-dollar power and reinforcing the financial-corporate-govt collusion that maintains the current capitalist structures.
The structure of an organized body politic is not the problem.
The problem is that the body politic has been beaten into submission by those same corporate-government oligarchs to such an extent that most people just “go with the flow” because fighting it is exhausting and seemingly impossible.
No, this is wrong. Saying war is for money gives war too much credit - it's not good for anything and it doesn't make anyone any money. The opportunity cost is too great.
The US does not care about "the petrodollar". Nor do we care about foreign oil. Nor do we have remotely the same economy we did in 1935.
In fact, war is not even profitable for our military industrial complex. They profit from the threat of war because that funds development of untested superweapons. Actual wars mean all that stuff actually has to work though, and there's a chance you'll get nationalized.
But if it was good for some MIC rich people, it still wouldn't matter, because they're outnumbered by all the other rich people it's bad for.
It's not true, though. War is an effective wealth transfer mechanism - from the lower/working classes to the rich war parasite class. Halliburton absolutely profited from the Iraq invasion, though in aggregate you're absolutely right that prosperity is reduced by wars.
OTOH, almost all corporations are less democratic than the most dictatorial governments. Sure, corporations don't (generally) get to be responsible for genocidal armies (except when they do[0]), but "greed" does mean corners get cut on safety, which was a big part of how trade unions in particular (and communism more broadly) got popular in the first place in the latter 1800s and early 1900s.
There's no perfect solution. I think so far we've done best with whatever's the most democratic (which is sometimes trade unions and sometimes capitalism), but even then, democracy itself is what sounds convincing rather than what is true — and the difference between them matters most when you've got an AI trained to respond with what people upvote the most, which is all of them from ChatGPT's RLHF to the Facebook/Twitter/etc. timelines to Google/Amazon/YouTube etc. search results…
People elected to government often seem to seek power for powers sake and I have less faith that they'll not harm us.