[klum]

I agree that the article is a little heavy on the author's opinion — the quote above neglects to put the perils of software and machine learning in any kind of relation to their positive impact, which makes it sort of pointless. Also, headlining a section "I don't care", when the (paraphrased) quote is "I don't care why people listen to me, as long as I have a positive impact", is just ridiculous.

[ForHackernews]

Semi-serious question here: What are some of the "positive impacts" of big data/machine learning?

We have somewhat better (but still bad) image search, and somewhat better (but still bad) machine translations. Anything else?

[klum]

I'm not sure... someone else can probably give a better answer on this! Medicine, weather prediction, logistics and driving aids are a few possibilities that come to mind, but I don't know if those are actual ones.

Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.