David E. Goldberg, author of The Entrepreneurial Engineer, and director of the lab that today showed that P=NP (see post here), today renounced capitalism by disavowing the approach of TEE and by resigning as chief scientist of Nextumi, a web2.0 company that is officially releasing sharethis, a ubiquitous sharing tool, this week. "Marx and Foucault were right. Capitalism is an oppressive system and all discourse is mere posturing for power. I can no longer toil in the vineyards of a self-serving elite whose very existence is anathema to the interests of a yearning global proletariat." Asked if he wasn't also abandoning the competitive and innovation principles embedded in his evolutionary computation work and The Design of Innovation, Goldberg said that "Mathematics is one thing. People are another. I can no longer live knowing that my work might be used by unscrupulous operators and even venture capitalists to justify their evil."
When asked what system might be better, Goldberg had this to say. "I think Plato had it about right in The Republic. Abolish private property, family relationships, and install a philosopher-king. Just because Socrates was an ugly pest doesn't mean that he and his star pupil didn't have something interesting to say. Moreover, this system seems to be working well at the University of Illinois, so I think it might just scale well to the US economy."
See the whole press release here.
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