Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is all a red herring. At least until we crack GAI, at which point paperclip maximizers and other lethal agents of pure technology come knocking. Point being: technology, so far, has never been autonomous. But technology also doesn't grow on trees, nor does it stick out from the ground like a valuable rock. Technology is actively invented, and requires costly reproduction and maintenance. It only sticks a…
A corporation is just a group of humans. There's also clear governance. The CEO makes the decisions and the board of directors has oversight. The shareholders elect the board members. It's ultimately still a group of humans making the decisions, and they are almost always rational decisions, may just not look that way from the outside with only a partial view.
This is true in the same sense that a human is just a group of cells. There, too, is clear governance. The brain cells together make the decisions and the endocrine system provides oversight. Or something.
A corporation is a dynamic system. There are roles with various responsibilities, but no one - not even CEO - is truly free to make decisions. Everyone is dependent on someone else; there are feedback loops both internal, and those connecting the corporation to the rest of the economy. Then there's information flow within, and capability of various corporate organs to act in coordinated fashion. All that is mediated by a system called "bureaucracy", which if you look at it, is nothing but a runtime executing software on top of human beings[0]. There are some good articles postulating that corporations are, in fact, the first AI agents humanity created. They just doesn't feel like it, because they think at the speed of bureaucracy, which isn't very fast. But it is clear that corporations can and do make decisions that seem to benefit the organization itself more than any specific individual within it[1].
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[0] - You send a letter to a corporation, it is received, turned into a bunch of e-mails or memos traveling back and forth, culminating in the corporation updating some records about you, and you getting a letter in response. That looks very much like a regular RPC, except running on humans instead of silicon.
With that in mind, it shouldn't be surprising that the history of software is deeply tied to corporations, enterprise systems, office suites, databases, forms - all kinds of bureaucracy that existed before, but was done on paper. Software slots into these processes extremely well, because it's mostly just porting existing code, so it runs on silicon instead of humans, as computers are both faster and cheaper than people.
[1] - Compare a common observation about non-profit orgs, where lack of profit motive makes it clearer that, at some point, the whole organization seems to focus on perpetuating itself - even if it means exacerbating the problems it was trying to solve. C-suites and workers both come and go, leaving to be replaced by new hires - yet the organization itself prevails.