Comment by memling

> I can't imagine I was the only one.

I'm sure not, and hopefully the description I provided isn't a blanket one. And, to be clear, I'm also not trying to say that working for any of those organizations is per se unethical. I don't think that this is the case.

The point, rather, is that ethical and moral considerations are actually much nearer to us than might appear at first blush. Sometimes this happens by the mere nature of the work (killing people more efficiently) and sometimes by scale (now when we surface search results, we make direct impacts on what people learn, where they shop, how they receive advertisements, etc., none of which was true in 1999). Navigating this isn't easy (indeed, you can make an argument that there is a morally good outcome for killing people more efficiently; I'm not saying it's necessarily a good one, but that one can be made), but we don't routinely equip people to think about it.

To make matters worse, our cultural assumptions shift over time. The Google/Facebook difference is illustrative. Page and Brin are a generation older than Zuckerberg, and their assumptions about what it means to be moral are probably not the same. These assumptions also change based on circumstance--when we scale a business from a garage to a billion dollars, it's hard to maintain the True North on your moral compass (assuming such a thing exists).

Anyway, I think a deep skepticism about human nature and the utility of technology is probably very useful in these situations.