You are right that the analogy breaks down at the assumption that humans would allow the paperclip machine to run amok; human wants do powerfully change and influence the market machine. At the same time, the abyss gazes into us, and human wants change in response to the machine as well.<p>I&#x27;ll give an example that intersects the Pavlovian scare words of both &quot;capitalism&quot; and &quot;government&quot;: the Prison-Industrial Complex. It&#x27;s reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or &quot;cheaters&quot; of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.<p>The final product is something we don&#x27;t actually want: the most populous prison system in the world, which is massively expensive, socioeconomically predatory, and fails to rehabilitate most of its inmates. Yet there are enough stakeholders who <i>do</i> want the institution to persist for reasons of personal benefit (and enough taxpayers who want to imagine a cute moralistic story and are willing to pay for the luxury of ignorance), that a massive machine of oppression is created and sustained out of a simple, reasonable human want.<p>I&#x27;m not intrinsically anti-capitalist; I&#x27;m in the camp of Jaron Lanier, in that money, markets, and corporations are all technologies, and neither good nor evil. But technology should serve humans, and not the other way around; that means paying attention to the power of unchecked, autonomous feedback loops and their power to influence human behavior and our various social ecosystems.