Greta wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:45 am
I don't think the likely (current) lack of phenomenological emotion in companies is the important issue so much as they behave in a way that suggests desire and fear. My point is that companies are not collections of people. The historical synergies are such that they take on a life, will and character (culture) of their own. When a tax break is given to a company, that is not going towards improvements in staff pay rates and conditions, although it may keep a small percentage employed for longer. Most, however, will go into investments (into other organisations), the executive and owners.
You see how that is very different to a person earning an income? When I get paid, I spend some on my bills and all the other boring things that are necessary. And then I spend some on whatever I like in the moment. As a human I have the literal ability to enjoy things and purchase them towards that end for no good reason. I don't request a budget item from a board of directors to enable this, unless we are about to invoke a metaphor in which some part of the brain is really a board of directors.
You have correctly identified that what belongs to a company ultimately belongs to those people who own that company, not the company itself which is property in a way that people cannot be.
What companies actually are is a matter of philosophical controversy within the field of economics. There are competing theories but it can be roughly summarised as an organisation with some of the benefits of a family (high levels of trust and integration) that doesn't require people to work only with blood relatives, in a setting that reduces transaction costs that would occur if those individuals attempted to work without joint organisation. It's a stretch to describe any organism as doing exactly that stuff. Pick a different explanation for companies and the same problem will present itself. I'm not sure I buy into the sci-fi thing about future companies holding phenomenological properties.
Greta wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:45 am
It's their increasing independence of their eminently replaceable human components that I would like to point out and a significant reason why everything appears to be going so crap is that these entities are doing to us what we did to other species - took control and dominated for the sake of self interest. They are so large and powerful that we little people are being easily sidelined and that imbalance has made actual democracy ever more difficult.
First up there are clearly many tasks that humans perform within a company which are nothing like eminently replaceable by non-human labour. Functions that require any level of discriminating creativity remain entirely beyond computational possibility. I have seen the well publicised results of AI composing musical scores, it is impressive in the same way as the dog walking on two legs.
Secondly, jobs in which humans can be replaced by technology or animals have been getting replaced that way since the invention of farming. Before the animal drawn ard, farmers tilled the earth with digging sticks and hoes. If human labour had not routinely been replaced by other things for thousands of years, you and I would both be scratching out a living with wooden tools, not typing on fancy computers. Replacing humans in the workforce is why we aren't subsistence farmers, it makes it possible for humans to do jobs that cannot be replaced such as being doctors and teachers. Better still, replacing some of their work with machines would mean we get more one on one time with teachers for slower kids, or that doctors no longer had to work 90 hours a week to keep people alive, this would be a good thing if we can work out how to do it.
Beyond that, I am not really buying into the premise that everything is crap. I think that this gloomy outlook is drawn from loss of perspective. Frankly it would be nice if robots
could do all the work because they don't consume the fruits of their labour, and thus that would mean humanity got to do so without the bit we don't like on the whole (the work).
Greta wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:45 am
It's not really a metaphor and there's no need to anthropomorphise because ants do much the same as companies. Large corporations at this stage more resemble colonies than organisms; if you injure or cut off one department it may not necessarily disturb some others. That's about interdependencies and information feedback flows. If any significant event rapidly ripples through a corporation, whose various relevant departments and sections immediately kick into action, then we are getting something like a simple nervous system.
It's a mistake to begin a paragraph with 'not really a metaphor' only to end with 'we are getting something like'.
It's either exactly a metaphor in which case it is like something, or else the transmission of significant events that ripple through a company actually is a nervous system.
Greta wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:45 am
Many dynamics in nature are repeated with some variations, eg. atoms, solar systems, galaxies, eukaryotic cells, eusocial colonies and organisations. It's looking to me that political reformations are taking place and command economies seem more likely to be a long term trend than a fad.
Command economies subvert the market driven actions of businesses to political expedience directed by states, which seems to be the reverse of your point. Atoms and solar systems may look superficially similar in that they can both be represented by diagrams of small things orbiting large things, but that is a very limited linkage and deriving economic expectations from it is likely to end in disappointing investment returns.