Comment by dasil003

As someone who has been CTO at a small company, senior leadership at a scaleup, and now middle management at a large co, I can tell you that what you are imagining is not structurally possible in our current system.

That's not say leaders here and there aren't thinking about what they're building and the macro effects, but you have to understand that unless you're bootstrapped and self-funded, even the most morally minded CEO is still beholden to investors who primarily care about money. You can only be as ethical as your board allows, and that primarily comes from profitability and financial success. In the good times its easy to talk a big game (eg. Google's "Don't be Evil"), but eventually competition comes for us all, and if your morality is hurting the bottom line you will be replaced. The backstop would be customer sentiment, but most buyers (whether B2B or B2C) are also not morally motivated. That's why free + ads is the dominant model, why micro payments failed despite years of techie hand-wringing, and paid consumer apps outside of streaming are vanishingly rare.

It's not all hopeless though. If things reach a high enough threshold of public sentiment then we can put legal and cultural pressure that will actually change things top-down. I think this is where AI is probably going as it's the most universally feared and hated impact across party lines that I have seen during my life, and the leaders in charge seem incredibly tone deaf about how it's being perceived, so I do expect regulation and softer forms of social enforcement to affect that trajectory. But if you're hoping for individual CEOs and leaders to fix our systemic problems, don't hold you're breath, they are just as replaceable as the workers under them.