This comment comes across as small minded and pessimistic without real evidence. Scientists and engineers typically help the world, with or without money. See Gates, Stallman, Page & Brin, Clair Cameron Patterson, etc

Page and Brin have repetitively again and again compromised their stated moral positions in pursuit of money. They are billionaires that put thousands of smaller businesses out of business on a regular basis. The company they operate has paid off a large number of government officials to protect them from prosecution, and they have a level of power and influence that rivals oil companies.

If you were trying to show altruistic examples of scientists and engineers, you fell very far astray.

Please be specific about this payment of govt officials to protect them from prosecution. I have never heard any whisper of such a thing, I think that's BS. They have influence in that people use google.com. You can argue they compromoised to keep their power, but you need to be specific. They don't like NSLs, they just have to obey them.

I'd like to strongly present these two points in particular to answer your queries. I could go into the number of Congressmen Google has paid for, but I'll just refer you to opensecrets.org there.

1. Google had a previous FTC Commissioner in their pocket under Obama (named Joshua Wright). The same former FTC Commissioner is now part of Trump's transition team for the FTC. The FTC is charged with regulating companies like Google. The best source I can give you is The Intercept, which not only describes his quadruple-revolving-door, but links to the various stages of it. And yes, an investigation of Google by the FTC was quietly closed during his tenure.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...

> "Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government."

2. In their original paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page argued that advertising had a fundamentally corruptive influence on search. If you compare the quote from their paper below, which indicates a strong need for an uncorrupted academic search engine, with their multibillion dollar advertising empire, the only logical conclusion is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page value money and power over any sort of highminded desire to benefit society. You'll also notice that Google displays paid ads for websites that should naturally be the top result, like showing a paid Best Buy link above the official Best Buy website search result when searching for "best buy", just as they originally indicated was a trait of a "worse" search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> "Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Income inequality, labor arbitrage, job loss to industrial automation, exponential increases in the surveillance state, healthcare cost increases, this list could go on indefinitely. Scientists and engineers intentions are largely moot as long as their inventions and innovations are consistently used to further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a vanishingly small minority of the world population.

You life in the Middle Ages definitely would have been way much better. /s

Don't get too nostalgic about the middle ages: the landed gentry who will own the AI/fully automated factories will occasionally require mechanical-turk-type work done by the serfs. Which side will you be on when your job gets automated?

That's an interesting twist. So my job that requires knowledge and brainwork gets fully automated, but mechanical-turk-type work somehow is not?

To expand, Oppenheimer, Turing, Feynman and even Gauss come to mind. Really stupid comment.

Those weren't engineers. Mathematicians and physicists, really.

The KGB spy from the article itself wasn't even an engineer, but a chemist.

Those people are about as atypical as they come.

Scientists and engineers are just people. They can be moved to good or evil or anything in between just like anyone else.

> Scientists and engineers typically help the world, with or without money

Of course they do, the actual change has always been done by engineers and scientists, however, history only remembers the rulers and recently entrepreneurs

You're right, no one remembers Galileo or Copernicus or Mozart or Bach or Archimedes or Aristotle. Just the rulers....

> Of course they do, the actual change has always been done by engineers and scientists

That is demonstrably false. Caesar brought lasting change around him, just like Napoleon did. Alexander the Great, though his empire crumbled after his death, brought Hellenic culture to many areas in the world. And I would like to know how the work of "scientists and engineers" triggered the Arab spring.

Please stop throwing around Gates as an example of "working for humankind". His charitable work begun only very recently. Before that, he was a cold and ruthless money making machine.

He set up his foundation 20 years ago. Still too recent?

I can start a foundation tomorrow. Your point?

In any case, he was a billionaire several times over by then. The MS IPO was over 30 years ago.

Edit: Now that I re-read my comment, I come off as an arrogant prick. Sorry about that.

All I really meant to say was that setting up a foundation != charitable work. Any poor guy - like me for example - can setup a foundation, but it will only exist on paper.

Maybe you should start your foundation today rather than complaining that others don't do enough on an internet forum. One of those is more productive than the other.

What I meant by starting a "foundation" is setting up a non-profit company on paper. I have nowhere near the financials to fund it though.

But yes, I agree, this is not productive at all. My bad.

"His charitable work begun only very recently."

Oh you mean his tax deduction schemes?

"Before that, he was a cold and ruthless money making machine."

The world is going to suffer for decades under the proprietary NSA infected umbrella of his software. His ruthless machine lives on without him, he never turned it off.

Just wait and see, all this open sourcing from MS will increase and many will fall for the trap (embrace/extend), and then when the days of extenquish come around those of us who took the effort to transition to FOSS ecosystems will be far ahead of the game.

RMS is right. You either control the program or the program controls you.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

I'm an EE, and you are totally correct.

Change isn't always for the better.