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Art by Sam Lessin.

In 2017, Tech Will Seek to Regain Moral High Ground

Photo: Art by Sam Lessin.

One of the things that in recent history set the technology complex apart from finance and other industries has been the ability to simultaneously be financially successful and maintain broad-based admiration—sometimes bordering on adoration—from the public.

That nexus of love and success was threatened in 2016, for the first time in a long time, thanks to everything from the job loss implications of self-driving technology to the fake news debate.  

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Opinion economy
The Layoff Contagion Is Hurting Us All
Art by Clark Miller.
Alphabet. Salesforce. Microsoft. IBM. Zoom. Meta Platforms. Amazon. The list goes on. More than 300,000 people laid off just in technology, just in the past year, and the number keeps growing—Disney, Goldman Sachs, Philips, Boeing, Meta (again), Amazon (again), even McKinsey. Seems like everyone is joining the layoff bandwagon. Many, indeed virtually all, of the companies that have...
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From left, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Google Brain chief Jeff Dean. Photos by Getty, Bloomberg
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