alt Hacker NewsThis one I do disagree. It is hard to recognize what is going on in people's mind but it doesn't mean one should disregard it. Because the motivation decides the long term outcome, what seems to be uplifting might well become agonizing in near term like the other reply in this thread said, the tech is so intrusive that people can't get rid of it. Like the recently exposed massive uploading of screen recordings in Xiaomi and a bunch of other phones, there's nothing much that can be done to undo this kind of crap to actually uplift people's lives.
Motivation doesn't decide anything. Actions decide the long term outcome of actions.
And the things you're mentioning are non sequiturs similar to the initial point. China (and the US and most of every major power) is a surveillance state. That has nothing to do with whether or not they are uplifting the lives of people. Uplifting while protecting the privacy of individuals would be ideal, but that's an ideal that unfortunately does not exist anywhere.