Steve Jobs is a terrible example. He gets a lot of love for being a Buddhist (which is, of the world religions, the one I am closest to) and having, for a businessman, a 99th-percentile design sense. In actuality, he was a huge dickhead. I could overlook his personal issues (you'll never get to the bottom of a stranger's personal life, to try is useless gossip) but the collusion with Eric Schmidt cemented my contempt for the man, co-religionist or no. I wish he had lived two years more to see that his legacy would be a great crime, not the iPhone.
When you're 13, tech is fun. Dragon Warrior! Final Fantasy! Tales of Phantasia! I'm sure that anyone born before 1965 or after 1990 is going to be taking me on faith, but these games were awesome.
When you're 19, tech is even more fun because you actually learn how things work and discover mind-bending ways of solving problems. Assembly code! C! Lisps! Machine learning! Haskell!
When you're 25, tech is important because it holds the power to solve some of humanity's most pressing issues. We may get to a point where we can prolong life as long as people wish at 1/100 the cost of the current expense-sink we call "health care". We may avert a global warming catastrophe with clean nuclear power (thorium fission? fusion?) We might escape this disgusting arrangement in which one nation being rich requires others to be poor, and arrive at a post-scarcity world in the next few decades. If any of this happens, technology will play a key role.
After 30, you realize that while technology still can be fun and holds promise and importance, the tech industry is run by megalomaniac 21st-century robber barons with the ethical fibre of Zombie Hitler's taint sweat. Technology becomes just work, for most people.
When they see their kids addicted to lit screens and possibly falling into the in-app purchase suckholes that they spent months of their life optimizing for addictiveness and "whale" recruiting, well... they have reasons to be concerned. Stay away from that shit! I helped cook it!
I'm curious what point you're trying to make by linking my comment, because I don't think it means what you think it means. I actually really enjoyed working at Google when Eric was CEO, and I can respect Larry's Google as well even though I choose not to work there. My comment was intended to illustrate the difference in culture under the two CEOs, as well as the choices they have to make in response to the outside environment, and not as a value judgment on those choices.
When you're 13, tech is fun. Dragon Warrior! Final Fantasy! Tales of Phantasia! I'm sure that anyone born before 1965 or after 1990 is going to be taking me on faith, but these games were awesome.
When you're 19, tech is even more fun because you actually learn how things work and discover mind-bending ways of solving problems. Assembly code! C! Lisps! Machine learning! Haskell!
When you're 25, tech is important because it holds the power to solve some of humanity's most pressing issues. We may get to a point where we can prolong life as long as people wish at 1/100 the cost of the current expense-sink we call "health care". We may avert a global warming catastrophe with clean nuclear power (thorium fission? fusion?) We might escape this disgusting arrangement in which one nation being rich requires others to be poor, and arrive at a post-scarcity world in the next few decades. If any of this happens, technology will play a key role.
After 30, you realize that while technology still can be fun and holds promise and importance, the tech industry is run by megalomaniac 21st-century robber barons with the ethical fibre of Zombie Hitler's taint sweat. Technology becomes just work, for most people.
When they see their kids addicted to lit screens and possibly falling into the in-app purchase suckholes that they spent months of their life optimizing for addictiveness and "whale" recruiting, well... they have reasons to be concerned. Stay away from that shit! I helped cook it!