Actually ChatGPT-4 explains it way better than I do:
The author is trying to convey that the situation with corporations and human labor doesn't have to be an extreme of either using human labor or not using it at all. They argue that corporations are gradually relying less on human labor, but that doesn't mean it has to drop to zero for negative consequences to occur within society.
They also bring up the stock market as an example of a system that focuses on optimizing for profit (paperclips) rather than human welfare. The author implies that many wealthy individuals primarily focus on accumulating more wealth (paperclips) and may only contribute a small portion (guilt tax) to alleviate any sense of responsibility for the negative consequences of their actions on society.
I like the idea of “paperclips” as a substitute for the change of what money / profits mean “post Realwirtschaft”. Finance keeps on reigning supreme (ever increasingly) since the 80s. Why not change the vocabulary to better reflect that.
Respectfully, I don't think that you understand my point.
Paperclips are an extremely poor metaphor for financial assets. Rich people want to get paid for being rich. That's what financial assets do. Paperclips do not do that.
Sort of. Less cynically, the economy is not a zero sum game so some of those returns can be organic shares of positive-sum activities that make life better for everyone. Cynically, they sure don't have to be, because peasant juice tastes just as sweet. There is an awful lot of runaway rent seeking hiding in the clothes of "investment." Either way, assets represent an entitlement to the proceeds.
My point here isn't so much to pass moral judgement on capitalism as it is to assert that money and assets have fundamentally different character. They are easy to confuse due to the liquid market for exchanging the two, but the lines of reasoning that lead us to a concept of "enough money" do not lead us to a concept of "enough assets." We might independently arrive at a concept of "enough assets" by hypothesizing a situation where one person controls a 10% of world GDP or something but world GDP is 100T and the richest people own about 100B in assets so at a 10x multiple they are probably at least three orders of magnitude removed from a self-serving definition of "enough assets" (and that would be the relevant definition, since they would be the ones defining "enough.")
tl;dr Rich people DO stop maximizing money -- but then they start maximizing power, which can be bought with money, and which we measure in units of money.
The author is trying to convey that the situation with corporations and human labor doesn't have to be an extreme of either using human labor or not using it at all. They argue that corporations are gradually relying less on human labor, but that doesn't mean it has to drop to zero for negative consequences to occur within society.
They also bring up the stock market as an example of a system that focuses on optimizing for profit (paperclips) rather than human welfare. The author implies that many wealthy individuals primarily focus on accumulating more wealth (paperclips) and may only contribute a small portion (guilt tax) to alleviate any sense of responsibility for the negative consequences of their actions on society.