It's scary (Stanford prison experiment-like) how easy it is to convince a regular joe employee that what he's working on is "for the betterment of the world", while that statement is very very fuzzy to say the least (and as recent events have shown) where one man's Utopia is another man's surveillance state. We put waaay too much impetus on "world changing ideas" while completely ignoring the real life implications of them, as the article rightfully points out.
Reminds me of the statement that Noam Chomsky ended his recent talk at Google with (which I consider one of the nicest "burn" moments ever):
Interviewer: It's not everyday that a non-google gets to sit in a room full of people who work at google, and are s/w engineers, and are advertising experts, and are market experts in different fields. Do you have anything that you'd like to ask us?
Chomsky: <shrugs> Why not do some of the serious things?
Reminds me of the statement that Noam Chomsky ended his recent talk at Google with (which I consider one of the nicest "burn" moments ever):
Interviewer: It's not everyday that a non-google gets to sit in a room full of people who work at google, and are s/w engineers, and are advertising experts, and are market experts in different fields. Do you have anything that you'd like to ask us? Chomsky: <shrugs> Why not do some of the serious things?
https://youtu.be/2C-zWrhFqpM?t=59m16s