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I don't think there a good list of the actual Hyper Corps that make up the PC.

Sunward details the PC a little more, and has a list of major percentage holders in the Hypercorp Council. Anyway, DW hit it pretty firmly. Take a giant cyberpunk megacorp and give it another 50-100 years of sophistication and technological advancement. You don't need giant 100 story skyscrapers filled with cube-farms and knowledge workers. You need a couple floors in an office park racked with servers so your indentured infugees can do all the work. You don't need a corporate compound the size of a small country anymore: your executives can live in mansions on Progress, your Black Lab can be buried in Mercury, while primary production is in a small nanofab plant on Mars and all your assets are on secure servers contained in a Lunar bank. It's all about efficiency. Employees are all contractors or management. The huge hypercorps, guys holding multiple percent in the Hypercorp Council are usually big enough to require building entire hab stations to act as a central focus for their industry, but that's a scale thing. Direct Action sends mercs and materiel all around the solar system, so it's only natural they have a central location where they can collect all the data, resources, etc. Meanwhile, Solaris banking is pretty important but they are nothing BUT e-commerce, so they basically don't exist outside of secure servers and simulspace offices.

FNR wrote:

First sorry for the long silence, work was a bit hellish and I didn't find the time to reply.

Don't worry about it. Real life gets in the way of my fun too. Anyways, time to answer your questions. Limited AIs are things that can do work, but they are things that can't render a human obsolete. They can't improve skills, there is limit to how skilled they can be, and they are unable to act well outside their programing. An AI designed for mining isn't going to be able to design blueprints for a war machine, nor can it hack someone's bank account and drain their savings. They also can't do things the require creativity. Furthermore, they are often too much a like. If you figure out how to fool one, you can probably fool the of its siblings (forks and copies). Another part of the equation is that the majority of people don't trust AIs. During the fall, they were the enemy or something that could be hacked. Even humans sleeved in synthmorphs are looked at with suspicion because they can be hacked. There is work that is only entrusted to humans because they are not AIs. Thirdly, AIs are not the best customers. There is some incentive to not render people obsolete so they can continue to be customers. There is effort in meme warfare to convince people that they have certain wants and needs, or control their thinking. Fourth, not everyone is employed. At least not in legal professions. There are plenty of criminals. Some of whom are criminals because they need to be criminals to survive, some are criminals because the law works against their freedoms (these are often AGIs and Uplifts), and some are criminals because its their nature. *shrugs* This isn't my best topic. I hope that I at least gave you some ideas of how the economy could work. I'll try to do some more research on it later.

FNR wrote:

Each single person was just a replaceable cog in the wheel but there were millions of them and they were needed. With so much work being done better by specialized AIs and drones that mostly leaves high level creative jobs or jobs in the service sector (which probably can also be done by AIs). I can see how the 'anarchist' economies work under that assumption. But I don't see how an extremely capitalist system like the PC would work as most people would be unemployed. So what do people do for a living when most work can be done better and cheaper by machines?

Simply put, for a given resource input R there is an amount of the population that can be supported, with X% of that population devoted to producing those resources, Y% into increasing the ability to harvest/use resources, and the rest producing information in the form of Knowledge or Culture. What machines and AI do is inhabit the first and (partially) the second of those sections, but leave the third untouched - but the proportions remain the same, so that the economy is the equivalent of one with a vastly greater population. Even better, it's the last one that produces the things that define our quality of life, and there isn't a 'cap' on how many jobs there are when it comes to producing information, and a very loose one when it comes to services - Steam doesn't have a limit on how many games it can publish or how many developers it can support. In practice, this promotes freelancing or subscription based employment systems, which keys into the hypercorps as service providers concept - an artist may produce a hundred pieces a month but only sell one, but single sale provides enough for a two months at a comfortable lifestyle. Again, look at Patreon. The technical side of things can work similarly - a company can give a single creative task to a hundred freelancers and pay them each enough to live by whilst the 'best' result gets a bonus. The extra cost is minimal compared to their profit margin but provides access to a ridiculous level of talent and potential. Sound familiar? It should - it's how gambling addictions work. Human beings are fine at avoiding the Stick, but we're psychologically and physiologically unprepared to avoid the Carrot; doing good things for bad reasons is hard to fathom or condemn, and the concept of the Hero who damns themselves for the greater good is a Cultural Idol. (Also pertinent - this is also similar to how artificial super-intelligences work, as the population acts as a Massively Parallel processor array. Hey, isn't the Exsurgent Virus specifically designed to infect ASIs?) So how can there be unemployment? Easy Answer - there shouldn't be. It's artificial. Did you know that “the forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest” - when you deprive someone of something, they become hyperaware of that thing and develop an intense craving for it? The Indenture system deprives the subjects from entertainment, mental stimulation and novelty, and when they come out they're not only given the chance to binge on those things but actively encouraged to do so: Indentureship makes you crave stimulation, and the economic system uses that to get you hooked on 'being productive'. PC Citizens aren't Wage Slaves – they're Wage Junkies.

Not quite accurate. There are some Hypercorps that DO have massive worker populations. Starware has tens of thousands of actual, genuine transhuman construction workers for the Korolev shipyards, for example. They have at least as many (more, I think) AI drones, and are growing that number all the time, but they are one of the major employers in Lunar orbit. Now, Luna is one of those places that doesn't like AIs or AGIs much, but it's still notable. Some jobs just need tonnes of workers, and it's convenient to have the self-training self-improving transhuman ego doing the work. I think that some of the notable 'hyper' parts of these corps would be a fairly shallow management structure and heavy use of contracted management positions. The workers might not be going anywhere, but it's easy to hire a proven manager from across the system and bring him in for a short term contract.