The Finance Equation

A terrific article, courtesy kurzweilai.net/, offers an interesting and chilling premise:

Will corporations prevent the Singularity?

Given how unenlightened many companies are, the possibly of something like this happening is certainly not impossible though the web, and the connects it engenders, make this happenstance, IMHO, a remote possibility though other factors such as climate change, environment degration and resource depletion could do the deed without corporate assistance. With this in mind, Ben Goertzel's take on finance and the viability of companies in the future is both original and compelling when viewed through the lens of accelerating tech. 

"Yet my own intuition is that notions of money and economic exchange will become less relevant as intelligence exceeds the human level. I suspect the importance of money and economic exchange is an artifact of the current domain of relative material scarcity in which we find ourselves, and that once advanced technology (nanotech, femtotech, etc.) radically diminishes material scarcity, the importance of economic thinking will drastically decrease.

So that far from becoming dominant as in Accelerando, corporations will become increasingly irrelevant post-Singularity. But if they are smart enough to foresee this, they will probably try to prevent it."

Interestingly enough, the future of finance in the 24th century was intelligently discussed in First Contact when Lily was transported to the Enterprise in order to save her life. During her recovery, Picard explained to her how civilization functions in his time, something very different from Lily's tumultuous year of 2063 marking the end of the second dark age of man thanks to Zefram Cochran's invention of warp drive. Food for thought if you ask me.