Corporate Power

An interesting quote from a Miami Herald movie review of Ex Machina:

I have a real ambivalence about these giant tech companies. On the one hand, they’re amazing. They’re like NASA in the 1960s, except instead of going to the moon, we are exploring artificial intelligence and how to make universal translators and how to get technological benefits to remote parts of Africa. All this stuff is helpful and good and useful and admirable. But at the same time, there’s no real oversight on these companies. They’re not transparent. They’re hidden. That makes me nervous. I don’t care if they’re doing something wrong. That’s irrelevant. When they have this much power, someone needs to be watching them. So somewhere in this movie, I am trying to gently fan the flames of that fear. I wouldn’t call it paranoia, because that’s unreasonable. This is a very reasonable fear. There is no privacy anymore. Just forget it. That land grab is gone. It doesn’t exist. And that should be scary.

-Alex Garland