> What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping

> What is truly sad is that some of the smartest computing minds of our day are spending their efforts at these FAANGs not advancing society but rather helping keep people more addicted to social networks, optimize for clicks on video and web streams, pushing products in all your channels, and optimizing for the wrong things. How have we gone so astray? I think this sounds deeper than it actually is. What you're describing is just capitalism. A consequence of capitalism is that sometimes people figure out how to make addicting products and then capitalize on it (cigarettes, drugs, social media). Eventually we figure out the harm and work hard to stop the damage as much as we can. Cigarette usage is down to historic lows in the US, for example. Sometimes it takes a while and takes a lot of fighting. Another consequence is massive incentives to advance society. You can't deny that the vast majority of technology advances over the last 20 (or 40 or 60 or 80) years have been incredibly beneficial to society. And the advances wouldn't have happened if we didn't also risk the occasional bad actor coming up. We're still figuring it all out as a society. We've weathered worse and will come out of it stronger.