Too Much Power For One Man

Eh. This article emphasizes the wrong things. Larry Page isn't some super villain building robot armies to take over the world. Any significant harm he/Google might do to the world will likely be via the unintended consequences of actions motivated primarily by profit. We already see this -- the slow erosion of privacy expectations, etc.

As for all of the internet of things/robotics acquisitions and R&D... well, I'm not in the board room during these discussions, but I highly doubt that building robotic armies is on anyone's mind. More likely, Page et al. see this as a next major growth area and would like to stay ahead of the curve. Esp. the Boston Dynamics acquisition is probably less about military applications than general experience with complicated robots.

With truly evil billionaires out there - the Koch brothers come to mind - and family run organizations that take horrible advantage of employees - like Walmart and the Waltons - why is it so many people want to make a case against Google and its founders?

Yes, it makes sense to keep a check on powers. But I'm way more worried about all of our three-letter agencies and the private billionaire donations behind the power structure in Washington than the company that may in fact give me self-driving cars, give Internet access to remote parts of the world, and so on.

This article feels like it's doing nothing but trying to build an evil genius narrative where none exists. When you summon images of Lex Luther in the first sentence, you've lost me.

Larry and Sergey control 55% of the voting rights:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/04/02/google-sto...

if the rest of the shareholders don't agree with them they can... do absolutely nothing about it

Article forgot to mention Lex's many biometrics acquisitions (e.g. Neven Vision) prior to sending his fleet of cameras down every road in the civilized world, dabbling in mass genetics (23andme), "accidental" mass capture of open wifi traffic, spyware he convinced 63% of all web sites to deploy (Analytics), or the sensor-packed mobile devices he has root on in a few million peoples' pockets.

It would only require something like 0.25 9/11's to turn Lex into the worlds largest and most terrifying defence contractor. Of course this sounds ridiculous, but it's probably just a few short pieces of emergency legislation from reality

A fitting cartoon analogy for cartoon logic.

I am reminded of an Alan Moore quote:

“In the mid 1980's I was asked by an american legal institution known as the Christic Legal Institute to compile a comic book that would detail the murky history of the C.I.A., from the end of the second world war, to the present day. Covering such things as the heroin smuggling during the Vietnam war, the cocaine smuggling during the war in Central America, the Kennedy assasination and other highlights.

What I learned during the frankly horrifying research that I had to slog through in order to accomplish this, was that yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists, and ham fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the C.I.A., you really have nothing to worry about. If however you have a name similar to someone on a list targeted by the C.I.A., then you are dead?

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.

Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless...”