John, you’re free to dislike the piece. Wanted to offer you a different frame, and also engage with people who disagree in good faith :)

The claim (I am trying to make) is not that companies are virtuous, or that technology is self-justifying; it’s that, for better and worse, companies have repeatedly been the institutions most capable of building and deploying general-purpose technologies that improve society at scale.

If you think that’s wrong, I’d ask you to name an alternative institution and point to its track record. I’m not handwaving the risks of surveillance, extraction, or concentrated power; those are very real, and they are exactly why the problem is how to shape scale.

Whether we like it or not, the future is coming, and it’s our job to steer as hard as we can towards the good, pro-society, pro-human outcomes.

Thanks for the comment!