I don't like gentlemen who grin at me

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

Question 2/3

Question 3/3

This got more traction than I imagined and has motivated me to make a more thorough survey where I can actually parse the data.

Yet in presenting themselves as modern-day heroes, and justifying their record profits and cash mountains, Apple and other companies conveniently ignore the pioneering role of government in new technologies. Apple has unashamedly declared that its contribution to society should not be sought through tax but through recognition of its great gizmos. But where did the smart tech behind those gizmos come from? Public funds. The Internet, GPS, touchscreen, SIRI and the algorithm behind Google - all were funded by public institutions. Shouldn't the taxpayer thus get something back, beyond a series of undoubtedly brilliant gadgets? Simply to pose this question, however, underlines how we need a radically different type of narrative as to who created the wealth in the first place - and who has subsequently extracted it. And yet - where does government fit into these stories of wealth creation? If there are so many wealth creators in industry, the inevitable conclusion is that at the opposite side of the spectrum featuring fleet-footed bankers, science-based pharmaceuticals and entrepreneurial geeks are the inert, value-extracting civil servants and bureaucrats in government. In this view, if private enterprise is the fast cheetah bringing innovation to the world, government is a plodding tortoise impeding progress - or, to invoke a different metaphor, a Kafkaesque bureaucrat, buried under papers, cumbersome and inefficient. Government is depicted as a drain on society, funded by obligatory taxes on long-suffering citizens. In this story, there is always only one conclusion: that we need more market and less state. The slimmer, trimmer and more efficient the state machine the better. In all these cases, from finance to pharmaceuticals and IT, governments bend over backwards to attract these supposedly value-creating individuals and companies, dangling before them tax reductions and exemptions from the red tape that is believed to constrict their wealth-creating energies. The media heap wealth creators with praise, politicians court them, and for many people they are high-status figures to be admired and emulated. But who decided that they are creating value? What definition of value is used to distinguish value creation from value extraction, or even from value destruction?