Michael I. Jordan, machine learning demigod, UC Berkeley ... the young people who work at these companies operate in a world [Silicon Valley, Berkeley, etc.] where these kinds of discussions are commonplace. Many of them aren’t really engineers; they come from the humanities, philosophy, or other disciplines. They’re 25 years old, they’re naive, they don’t do engineering work, they’ve never worked at large companies where real products are developed for real people, with discipline. And they get together, a bit like in Parisian cafés in the 1920s, to talk about these grand science-fiction ideas. When these young people resign, they know they’re going to attract attention. It allows them to feel virtuous and to be seen as very important figures. They claim to be giving up money, but in reality, they already have their stock options. So all of this is a grand moralizing performance that doesn’t serve the real objective it claims to pursue. There’s a great deal of naiveté here, which goes hand in hand with a certain cynicism…