The New Robber Barons

Yep, it's the guys out in Silicon Valley:

Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets.

A decade ago these guys - and they are mostly guys - were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better.

Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives in many ways, but they also are disrupting old industries - and the lives of the many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom has expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic resources to match their ambitions.

And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls in Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money, that makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a war on stupid people.”

You can read the rest @
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/11/today-s-tech-oligarchs-are-worse-than-the-robber-barons.html

This is one of the reasons why I am so opposed to robots and AI. It is these new robber barons, and people working for them, who will program AI and armies of robots - using programming which reflects THEIR values.

History (and biology) have proven time and again that one species (or group) which thinks it's better or smarter than its neighbors inevitably will decide to kill them.

Stop these people now, or someday soon they will be killing all of us "stupid" people.

By the way, to them anything "old school" is stupid. And their favorite politician (Hillary) agrees with them.