Don’t Be Evil but Don’t Miss the Tech Train | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Be Evil but Don’t Miss the Tech Train

nytimes.com

21 pointsllambda10 comments

There is an idea mentioned here that seems to have been quite common in Silicon Valley during the first boom, and which perhaps is again, that tech companies are "changing the world for the better", and "making the world a better place."

Having that in your head as you work on a private, for-profit company seems very strange to me. Sure, you will make money in relation to how much people want what you sell, and perhaps they want it because it makes their lives better, but that's where it ends. As a private business, you take your pay in money, not karma.

I understand the notion that corporations are amoral entities that exist solely to profit and as such are immune to moral judgments, but I don't think an employee should ignore the final product of the company where he or she is employed and what sort of impact that product has on the world as a whole. A company can certainly sell products with significant negative repercussions that probably outweigh any positive contributions; the tobacco industry comes to mind as an obvious example.

This is probably also true for founders as well (I won't say it is, I've never been one). I don't really think too many people are sitting around thinking, "I'm going to start a company that screws a lot of people over but gets me rich!" As an employee, it would bother me if I believed that the company that employed me actively harmed the world as a whole; wouldn't that hold true for founders and their new companies as well?

(of course there's a spectrum here--not every company that isn't harming the world is contributing to it in any way)

That seems like an odd perspective. The fact that people are willing to give you money for what you sell sets a floor on its usefulness, not a ceiling. It's quite possible (virtually certain, in economic terms) that a good number of those people value your service at more than what they paid for it; otherwise they wouldn't have bought it.

All freely made purchases require that the buyer value the good or service they receive more than the money they pay.

Well, there's also the possibility that they value the good or service at exactly what they paid (eg. a first-price auction), and complications from information uncertainty (eg. "Buyer's Remorse"). I'd say these are a minority of transactions, though: if everybody felt shitty every time they bought something, they wouldn't buy things for very long.

I always heard of a perfect transaction as one where both parties felt slightly ripped off, but wouldn't reverse the transaction. People are bad at empathy.

About Google, the only way four them to abide to their "don't be evil" motto is to step out of business. But then, why not? They have money, they have brains, they have tools, why should they need to fight with competition? A gradual move towards a university-like model could be the right thing to do.

They would still need to make a lot of money, otherwise they'll end up like Sun.

The so-called 'latest' wi-fi data collection 'brouhaha' was two years ago. Google's strayed from the path a lot more since then.

All these mainstream "tech" stories coming since middle of last year remind me so much of the last technology bubble.

That said, this article covers a rare point in American press about the boundaries of social responsibility in business.

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