[Gormo]

I'll listen to that, thanks.

But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.

Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.

[Narciss]

I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)

My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.

Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)

Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.

One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p

[Gormo]

> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."

I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).

But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.

> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.

Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?

If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?

Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?

> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)

Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.

> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p

A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.