[internetter]

Under what criterion were your answers decided?

To play the devil's advocate: Google has vastly improved access to information. Facebook has allowed hundreds of millions of people to remain in each other's lives even while separated by oceans. Amazon made it much easier to acquire very specific items. Tinder has helped people find love.

[vlovich123]

Almost feels like a viewpoint that changes depending on how old you are & what your life experiences have been. I’m glad OP is so certain in his judgement though, especially ranking war machine companies as good for the world.

[a-french-anon]

People would go to war even with sticks and rocks, but the technological advances made by those companies probably trickled down to general aviation and produced generally interesting "things".

[vlovich123]

The amount of damage you can do and how quickly you can do it with sticks and rocks is a lot more contained and your ability to force project gets exponentially more expensive exponentially more quickly.

Well researchers employed by Google are where transformers were presented which is how all modern AI companies build their models. I'd categorize generative AI as generally interesting things. Or a massively useful search platform, they solved email (until they stopped really paying attention to it). They also promulgated Android which has a lot of fans. And that's just the very visible stuff you'll see as someone not in the field. They've also contributed to storage & distributed systems research in very tangible ways. Or the research they've been doing into protein folding with AI via AlphaFold.

Amazon pioneered modern cloud computing in such a way that they were the only game in town for a long time before Google and Microsoft attempted to compete.

But sure, it sounds like your bias is against any company that's a "virtual" company and for companies that produce "real" things. However, you may want to ask yourself whether those companies would be able to build those "real" things as efficiently without all the virtual technology supporting them & letting them offload that complexity.

[a-french-anon]

No, you're jumping to conclusions. if I put Google or Amazon in the "bad" bin, it's because I don't think all those technological advances (everything considered) make the world a better or more interesting place. I mean: AI? Cloud? Is this really the future you wanted?

In my eyes, advances in FEM simulation is what you can really argue for when talking about "support for builders of meatspace things".

[vlovich123]

I’m not jumping to conclusions. I think you’re discounting just how much companies rely on virtual technologies to enable them to build meatspace things more quickly and cheaply or to do simulation testing more quickly and cheaply.

And yes, cloud is definitely towards the future I want where I can easily spin up infrastructure to enable some project rather than having to figure out reliable hosting for myself from scratch every time. Cloudflare Workers are actually closer to what I want than the vision AWS and Google enable but it’s not as full featured yet and it wouldn’t exist without AWS creating the market in the first place. Of course there are issues around privacy of data and trusted compute that aren’t solved yet vs local, but the cost savings and simplicity va having to manage hardware (which I’ve also done ) are real.