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In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.
Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.
After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.
"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”
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Frankly a lot of engineers are soulless and their only north star is profit and lawsuits.
Yeah seriously most engineers I’ve ever met have a chronic case of sociopathy.
Hey man i just can’t make eye contact
Devil’s Advocate (damn near literally this time around)
Try being a young engineer at the top of your game and saying no to an offer where the yearly salary makes google engineers jealous. Not everyone can say no.
Palantir offers like 400k/year to run-of-the-mill forward deployed engineers for foundry (Civilian platform) where the job is 99% actually helping customers with interesting engineering problems.
I can’t even imagine what they are offering folks working on gotham (govt/military side.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is that while a ton of those engineers are soulless sociopaths, some of them just took a job that pays super well and they don’t personally align with the goals of the C-levels. And in fact - a ton won’t even know what those goals are.
Remember - Our enemy is the c-suite, not the level 1 support agent. Even at evilcorp. Thankfully I am in a position where my kids are grown up and the money treadmill isn’t set on hardmode for me anymore. I can say no. But even for me it is sometimes difficult.
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I haven’t either. But I can see how a young person without a lot of knowledge of the world and the impending weight of 50 years of work ahead of them, possibly with a family to feed, or an extended family to take care of due to the inherently predatory healthcare system where they were born, might make that choice. And I understand it, regardless of “forgiveness”.
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I would bet we have a lot of the exact same thoughts on why this happens, and probably how to solve it. My only disagreement - and it is not a strong one - is the impossibility of forgiveness.
If they mature and leave, or even better, commit to being a monkey wrench for a bit before leaving… I think I can find space for them in my community.
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Yeah, but what’s more feasible? Uniting a complacent society and not knowing when or where your next meal will be, or taking a hot check home and living comfortably? Especially when kids come into the mix. Why do you think they want to push the “have kids” and anti-abortion agenda? Because you’re only going to think about the best for your family and the best is stability and peace when it comes to children.
I don’t disagree with you, but I don’t condemn the little people trying to survive, either.
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How do you go from « saying no to cash » to « c-levels are the issue » in the context of ethical considerations for engineers that enable AI in military industrial complex?
The proverbial prospect engineer definitely decides that lives he will impacts are less relevant than his salary. That’s ethics & morality… and a seasoned AI engineer can certainly eat well enough in any other industry.
How do you go from « saying no to cash » to « c-levels are the issue » in the context of ethical considerations for engineers that enable AI in military industrial complex?
I am not sure I get what this word soup is saying. No offense intended but maybe try re-wording this if you want to discuss.
PS: foundry is not an AI platform, the engineers I am talking about are usually 20-ish year old java and python devs, and it is easier to understand how someone in that group might not even know how evil evilcorp is.
Try to read it slowly maybe?
I wonder what George Orwell would have to say about all this… nvm, he already said everything there is to say.
He would love it since he was a right-wing POS, snitch and thief among other things.
Colour me surprised, Bloomcole with another shit-tier take. I only don’t block them because they by far have my lowest Voyager tracked user score, -83 as of this comment, and I’m curious to see how low it’ll go simply by incidental Bloomcole exposure.
Checked their post history, did not disappoint. Check out where they respond to their own moderated, removed comment in a two week old dead post. They had a bit of a tantrum when I pointed that out.
Ooooh. I had a feeling this was a thing. Got here via another post and was just blown away by how bad this take was.
Not sure if we are talking about the same George Orwell here or how you came to the conclusion that he was a “right-wing POS” - he was definitely not.
Yeah that comment is a weird take. I think he was in the British army nd stationed in India, he wrote a bit about that, both fiction and non fiction. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any of that. I recall it was nuanced and contextual.
Maybe that commenter can cite some specific examples to back that up.
He ratted out left -wing resistance in Spain among other things.
You clearly know nothing about him.Edit: Wikipedia is a shit source, which again is proven.
Yep. I read some of his non fiction and he was clearly. a little Englander xenophobe. I have no doubt he would have supported Brexit and be hostile to.immigrants if he was around today.
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Very much hated blacks and gays. He stole the Animal farm idea that was about nazism and made it into anti-communist propaganda.
Also tried to rape a girl when he wasn’t busy being a rat and snitching on left-wing elements he infiltrated.
Total scum.
The battlefields in Ukraine are Palintir’s live fire laboratories. I wonder if they told Krasnov to STFU about denying or restricting military aid to Ukraine.
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lol
Title gore. Use some damn commas! (Not your fault, OP.)
A book about this was published last year. “Your Face Belongs to Us” by Kashmir’s Hill
Would be nice to get some numbers on the accuracy and performance of such a dystopian sci-fi technology (Minority Report?). There should be some, since it’s already in operation for 13 years…
They accurately recognized my face from a picture that was over ten years old. I no longer look like I did in the picture. This is going to get bad now that our fascist state authoritarians are everywhere jerking off with their riches and superiority. They have this tech and will do terrible things with it. Impending doom…
I’m not very surprised. I think even old-school face recognition does things like measure distance between your eyes, nose etc, and stuff like that (your skull) doesn’t change a lot during 10 years of adulthood. The real danger is that they connect all of that information. And as you said, it’s everywhere these days, they have a lot of sources and -of course- it’s in the wrong hands. I say “of course”, because I don’t think there are many applications to help with anything. That technology is mainly good for oppression. And predictive policing, social scores are content for Black Mirror episodes or old sci-fi movies. Not reality.
You seem well informed, can you help me understand this a bit? Is this basically just ACAB, so any kind of helping the cops is Bad too?
Well, I’m not a fan of oversimplifications and ACAB is one in this context. I think the people pushing for a repressive surveillance state are politicians and lobbyists. The police force is merely executing that. Though I bet they like expensive playthings and power and control. Because that’s kind of their job.
It depends a bit on where you live. Here in Germany I think we have quite some well-trained cops who do their job well. I’ve met some of them. And those do what they’re supposed to and help citizens with all kinds of things. Of course we also have bad cops, assholes who are cops, corrupt ones and people with blood on their hands, but I certainly hope they’re far and in between. In America I’m not so sure. I’d surely never help an agency like ICE. That’s proper fascist stuff and not ethical. Though I bet there are some cops who do good all day and rescue kittens from trees, idk. I don’t think there’s an issue with helping those if you like law and order.
I think the issue with surveillance and weird oppressive power abuse is bigger than those people. Sure they’re involved and being complicit makes someone bad as well, but they’re somewhere at the bottom when they do things like in the article above. Or randomly arrest people in NYC because they have $6 billion to waste on weird tech and some AI tells them to do wrong things. I think the real issue though are the people who give them the $6b, the people who decide what dystopian shit to buy with it, the people who passed the laws to instruct them to do it. And last but not least companies like Palantir who make a fortune off of people’s misery.
So you’d need to fight those. Opposing the police in certain ways might be part of that, but it’s not going to do much.
I’m an American living in London and I’ve been extremely impressed by the quality of policing here compared to America. And part of that quality no doubt has to do with the police dealing with overall less severe crime. So I suppose it’s a bit circular
But nonetheless, crime is essentially unsolved in East London and other parts of the country
So I agree that there’s a better version of policing but I reject that the solution to crime is just better police training
Do you see it as an unsolvable problem?
I think policing is a complex issue. And the US for example has almost ten times the homicide rate of the average European country. They have a lot of gang violence, school-schootings and everything is more extreme in the USA, for the better or the worse. I’d say it’s likely a comprehensive approach. Police needs equipment and good training. They need to be staffed. They also need good guidelines and strict oversight. We can’t have bad people or power abuse. And lawmakers and courts need to facilitate an environment in which things go into the right direction. Everything from the local to the national level. Then society has to agree to pull in the same direction. And it’s kind of an investment into all kinds of things. That will certainly pay off later, big time. But includes things like invest in healtcare for mentally ill people, invest in integration with immigrants. And invest in the proper solution for online crime. And then there’s neoliberalism and our overall concept of a society we want to live in. Of course people are more likely to commit crimes if they’re miserable or hungry or don’t have anything to lose. So we need a society where everyone has some decent living conditions, also feels alright and is integrated into society in some form. And for me it also includes some fairness and individual freedom.
I’d say it’s solvable. I mean not a 100% “perfect” world, but we can have a look at different countries and see how they do things and what it does to them. And there will always be crime, and always room for improvement.I agree with you
I would just say that the incentives aligned in America for law enforcement to choose “predictive policing”, whether they call it that or something else
Personally, I think the black mirror conversation is a false dichotomy and the argument that it only gets worse is a slippery slope fallacy
Predictive Policing is here if we like it or not, it’s not new, the feds have been studying how to profile people since before the web was even a thing
I do think the Patriot act was an abuse of power and it continues to be abused but I’m not convinced that we’re necessarily worse off (tactically speaking), I just think the law should be just and upheld appropriately
In this video about Lavender AI which is Israel’s Palantir, they talk about the accuracy score that the AI gives targets for how sure it is that they are Hamas. It is used to determine how expensive the weapons to take that person out, and how many innocent bystanders they are willing to take out along with that target.
Thanks, nice video and seems he has some numbers. Very inhuman that they figured out exact numbers how it has an allowance to take out 15/20 bystanders as well. Or an entire elementary school if it’s an high ranking “target”. I mean war is a bit of a different thing than policing. But a minimum 10% false positives plus collateral murder is quite a lot. And then I’m not sure if there is any substance to those numbers. I suppose they conveniently eliminate all the evidence with the same bomb that kills the people. And they don’t do research, so I wonder how they even figured out a ratio.
Yeah there’s already at least one well known case. This article mentions it https://wp.api.aclu.org/press-releases/208236
The use of facial recognition technology by Project NOLA and New Orleans police raises serious concerns regarding misidentifications and the targeting of marginalized communities. Consider Randal Reid, for example. He was wrongfully arrested based on faulty Louisiana facial recognition technology, despite never having set foot in the state. The false match cost him his freedom, his dignity, and thousands of dollars in legal fees. That misidentification happened based on a still image run through a facial recognition search in an investigation; the Project NOLA real-time surveillance system supercharges the risks.
“We cannot ignore the real possibility of this tool being weaponized against marginalized communities, especially immigrants, activists, and others whose only crime is speaking out or challenging government policies. These individuals could be added to Project NOLA’s watchlist without the public’s knowledge, and with no accountability or transparency on the part of the police departments
Police use to justify stops and arrests: Alerts are sent directly to a phone app used by officers, enabling immediate stops and detentions based on unverified purported facial recognition matches.
I’m looking more for large-scale quantitative numbers. I mean one destroyed life is really bad. But they could argue they’d have saved 30 lives in turn, and then we’d need to discuss how to do the maths on that…
Yeah, I am not sure but hopefully somebody has the numbers. That is usually the argument for trampling the constitution.
Hard to say how much has been actually documented bc they’ve been doing a lot of this stuff off record.
They potentially saved 30000 lives locking up 100 people for crimes committed by somebody else in a states they’ve never been to and we might not even know about it
Oh well, some people in the USA have a really “interesting” relationship with their own constitution these days… I sometimes feel like explaining it to them. Or what a constitutional republic is.
Yeah, keeping things “off record” is the usual strategy to get away with whatever you wanted.
Truly some Robocop dystopian shit.
"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”
If it aims as well as Gemini retrieves facts, I’m not really worried tbh.
I think one of the main points of the outrage is that it makes it more concerning, not less
they always were a spying software. thiel has always made it as a spying tech.
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The CIA company? No way!
Every time I hear that, I picture some guy stopping somebody else mid sentence when it comes on to be like “Wait, wait… you hear that? That’s me!” And then blasting it at full volume while he sings along. I feel like that’s had to have happened at least once or twice.
TBF it is a very catchy song
