>I think we need to start using the word evil for this. Because it is. It is gross irresponsibility. Gross abuse of a power situation, of a strong dependency, that the company quite knowingly creates.
Oh wow, good morning.
The parties which taught you the notion of "individual" (by defining you as such, and coercive-conditioning all other models out of you), all happen to be collectives: your family, your society, the institutions, the businesses' communication departments. They have the power of definition. An individual (by definition) does not.
It only gets worse from there.
For what purpose are you made "individual"? Collectives define you as "individual", in order to make you defenseless. Individuals have the useful property of being trapped within an infinite recursion of false "selves"; collectives, on the other hand, are neatly self-reifying. They do not have the organ of inhibition (pre-frontal cortex).
In the eyes of the state, corporations are something like artificial people, right? Alright, model them as legally constructed psychopaths out to get you - how to perform extralegal direct intervention upon 'em, same way they can do to us? It's only fair... wait no you can't! You'd only be hurting their constituent individuals. And you can't hurt them nearly as bad as whatever made them join the collective in the first place; it would not only be pointless but also cruel.
This notion of "individual" which lies at the center of Western individualism (and the related schools of thought which implicitly form your day-to-day behaviors in society, no reflection necessary) is an extremely fraught concept: look at it a little too intently and it begins to fall apart at the seams.
Making you see yourself as this thing called "individual", which is extensively studied with most rigorous methods, and somehow remains fundamentally inscrutable (hard problem of consciousness goes wheee!)... that's not very unlike a proprietary API or OS, is it? "Individual identity" is a useful (to whom?) abstraction over the incontrovertible, but by itself meaningless, physical being of a human organism. Unlike a collective, a body cannot be divided into constituent parts and remain itself; but Western civilization is nominally a world of minds over bodies, and minds are made out of ideas, and ideas can be taken apart and shared around just fine, within one body or among entire crowds.
So what we are observing is not evil; "evil" has meaning in the plane of independent individuals operating in mutually comprehensible moral framing. And that's always been a huge and harmful oversimplifiction.
It's much easier to view the behavior of transnational corporations as a whole as the AGI takeoff. But then one might want to consider when exactly it started - was it the LLMs that precipitated it (as many here seem to think), or is the concept of "artificial intelligence" itself a marketing smokescreen, and the NN/ML/LLM tech is just an inevitable performance optimization once the AGI has embedded itself deeply enough into human industry to direct resources towards the mass production of GPUs and other highly specialized accelerator cells.