Columbia Law School Professor Katharina Pistor wrote an article in Social Europe citing events that show a trend of placing our future in the hands of private corporations, with little public accountability.
In "Outsourcing our future to for-profit A," she cited two examples: the recent AI Nobel Prize win and California’s vetoed AI safety bill.
"There is nothing new to the argument that if we do not know enough about future damages, we should refrain from interfering in “private” markets, which always perform best without government “interference.” Oil and gas companies relied on it when denying the risk of climate change and their contribution to it, even as their own research told them otherwise. Yet here we are again. Apparently, we should place our future in the hands of private corporations whose sole purpose is maximising shareholder value. What could possibly go wrong?"
Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. She is also a faculty co-director with the Center for Political Economy.
