Thank you.
So I get a lot of downvotes and lose some imaginary internet points; that’s fine. I’m not attacking anyone, and for the most part nobody is attacking me, so I’d still call this healthy if contentious debate.
You are a person I would gladly grab a beer with when such things are a thing again.
However i disagree with your conclusion.
Palantir has some magical data summoning activities.here is why
Circa 1990, if you said there was a way you could get any answer you wanted in 10 seconds or less,you would have been called a charlatan.
Then google happened. Google is not worth billions because it just has a simple UI and is accesible. No. They have figured out how to make the web searchable.
Palantir is the same. Just because search is not romantic anymore, doesnt mean they dont have magic to them. If aggregating intelligence data was such a no brainer , google or many of the others may have taken a stab at the problem.
Here lies what i believe is a contradiction. If palantir does not have "magic", then why do you mention one of the most valuable companies on earth to describe palantir's function?
In short, just because the u2 has wings and turbines, it doesn't mean it was just another plane when it came out.
They do a lot more than what you claim. Did you forget e.g. blu/red force tracking and routes? Mission planning?
Good news is that I was one of those people that had a clearance, so can confirm that those individuals exist at least.
Bad news is because I had a clearance, I can’t say anything more than that. Way too much liability to even speak vaguely about it, even tho I no longer have it. The US government doesn’t play around with that type of stuff.
They were actually incredibly open with what they did technically, and a lot of who they worked with it’s just that nobody seemed to care at the time. They had tech talks showing the full system architecture on YouTube that didn’t get more than 10k or so views. A quick search indicates that a lot of those are gone now (maybe just outdated) and the channel is more marketing heavy now, but just as low trafficed.
They also open source a lot of their core technologies. The main database they used was “AtlasDB”, a relational layer on top of Cassandra. It’s open sourced and actively developed, and again, nobody seems to care, with it at a measly 700ish stars - https://github.com/palantir/atlasdb
People just like a good boogie man story, and after 2 decades of being labeled as such eventually you just stop trying to fight it I guess.
It just so happens that some of this modeling is done to optimize indexing and searching data on humans our government would prefer dead, and no specific work has ever been done by Palantir employees to optimize anything for this use case, right?
You produce a search engine that helps identify who to kill, but don't pull the trigger so you have no ethical responsibility, right?
This must be how arms dealers think when they sell to dictators.
Don’t blame those that build the software they use. To me that makes every open source project a potential ethical minefield since they could all be getting used to do immoral acts without even knowing about it.
As a concrete example, most of Palantir’s indexing and searching back when I was there was done using lucene. Should the lucene authors feel some moral conflict over this? If we’re shifting blame/responsibility down the tech stack why stop at the productized form? Why not the libraries? Why not the language?
I understand that the case is different since Palantir is more purpose built for this type of work, but you have to admit the lines get blurry pretty quickly.
When do we get to vote on the "no killing people based on shoddy intelligence" line item exactly?
Hell, we don't even get to vote for who we want to be president (the electoral college does that and it's certainly not one person, one vote).
That type of whataboutisim is at the heart of every major engineering effort of silicon valley and surveillance capitalisim that is used abusively on the masses.
We can say no. We -must- say no.
Making alcohol should be legal. Specifically selling it to a kid is not legal, because then you are specifically helping them commit a crime.
Likewise I don't blame steel mills for producing steel that is later used in guns wielded by dictators on their own people.
I sure do blame the people that sell the guns to said dictators with full knowledge of their likely use case though.
We as engineers have an ethical responsibility if we make a nuke with full knowledge the buyer probably intends to drop it on a city.
I once built a company that produced a very effective social data aggregator, classifier, and sentiment analysis engine with an easy search interface. It quickly identified sentiment trends across a dozen networks and could of been amazing for brand managers or stock traders. My investors decided they wanted to repurpose it for political propaganda and market it to a specific party. I could of said "well this is really cool tech, and I am making good money... Not my problem what they do with it". I thought that for a bit. I even helped build an MVP for political candidate tracking.
It felt wrong, so I quit. I didn't help them replace me. The company ended and all my years of work and research with it. So be it.
I don't always get it right, but looking back, -not- continuing that project remains one of the proudest choices of my life.
This seems reasonable.
> Likewise I don't blame steel mills for producing steel that is later used in guns wielded by dictators on their own people.
So far, a steady train of thought
> I sure do blame the people that sell the guns to said dictators with full knowledge of their likely use case though.
This is a bit of a jump. Up to this point, you had a gradually growing line of argument, but then jumped straight to selling guns to dictators.
There's a step right before, and that's manufacturing the gun itself — is that acceptable in your view? I think most people agree that selling guns to dictators is bad, but whether or not the gun should be manufactured at all, and sold to police and militaries of countries with republican governments is debatable.
Palantir does not work with "dictators". At least according to their IPO S-1 filing, as a matter of policy they only work with US and her allies. Whether you think that NATO states constitute "dictators" is an orthogonal and controversial claim. If you agree that NATO defense agencies and local police departments don't constitute "dictators", then you would agree that what Palantir is doing here, per your analogy, is "making alcohol", but not "selling it to a kid".
I wouldn't conflate the US as a dictatorship (maybe a broken two-party corporatocracy), but in light of the BLM protests, dealing with local police departments to better surveil their own citizens is unethical. In light of Snowden's revelations, dealing with ICE to better surveil their own citizens is unethical.
I'm not sure that this is so clear cut. This also one of those things where it's fairly uncontroversial that the George Floyd (and all of the other comparable incidents) were unquestionably bad. But is that representative of all policing? Are police departments, as a concept, unethical? I'm not sure that this is clear cut or obvious.
And finally, all of these police departments are funded and run by republican forms of government (which BTW are predominately one-party democracies, just not the party that's popular to hate), that can democratically change. It's not a dictatorship. Any more than 21st century Italy is a "dictatorship" because it briefly had an authoritarian Prime Minister (Berlusconi).
> In light of Snowden's revelations, dealing with ICE to better surveil their own citizens is unethical.
Sure, and I think that it's up to the public to elect leaders that change these policies, which is possible because the US is a Federal republic, not a dictatorship. Unfortunately, in light of right-wing extremism, domestic surveillance is increasingly developing bipartisan approval. Is it unethical to serve the needs of the people even if some subset of those people don't approve of domestic surveillance? Unless it's not about doing business with dictators, it's about doing business with democracies that enact policies we don't like, but that's a different line of argument entirely, and one much less straightforwardly bad than "selling guns to dictators".
In their current state, yes. Tough on Crime, War on Drugs, and the prison-industrial complex are unwarranted and destructive.
> (which BTW are predominately one-party democracies, just not the party that's popular to hate), that can democratically change. It's not a dictatorship. [...])
State and local governments that don't change party-wise are much worse, as their actions are even less accountable; there's no reason to improve.
> in light of right-wing extremism, domestic surveillance is increasingly developing bipartisan approval
It used to be assumed we had domestic privacy; it's Snowden's revelations that let us know we don't have such rights. Now we've found ourselves in violation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But this presupposes that those things are unambiguously bad. "Tough on Crime"? The American public broadly agrees that crime is bad and should be punished. I agree with you that the War on Drugs is bad, but that's not representative of policing as a whole. I understand the "ACAB" outlook, but you have to understand that this isn't an objective moral position, it's purely subjective.
> State and local governments that don't change party-wise are much worse, as their actions are even less accountable; there's no reason to improve.
You're conflating dictatorships where the people have no mechanism by which to enact change with democracies where the people enact policies you don't like. As a software engineer at Palantir, you're essentially selling weapons to democratically elected governments whose constituents broadly agree with and vote for policies you don't like. That's obviously not great, but it's also not as obviously bad as the punchy "selling weapons to dictators".
> It used to be assumed we had domestic privacy; it's Snowden's revelations that let us know we don't have such rights. Now we've found ourselves in violation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Sure, and it's been 10+ years since Snowden's revelations. We've had 2 presidential elections and 2 mid-term elections since then to address the problem using the levers of our republican government. A far cry from "dictatorships", and by no means is it obvious that it's unethical to provide software for an elected government that has enacted policy you and I both don't like.
Yep. I've got a feeling this is a sentiment shared among all of the engineers working on shady tech. I'd also add, "and even if I quit, someone will quickly take my place."
I was in a similar situation as the GP. I was hired to work on a software that technology-wise we’d all agree was ethically neutral. But if you looked at who all our customers were, and what they used it for, I’d guarantee many HN posters would have ethical concerns. I ended up quitting for a number of reasons, but the ethics of who our customer base was ranked pretty high in that decision.
This is a slippery argument.
There is a difference in building a car that people can drive and one that is specifically to be used as a weapon.
This sounds like an equally slippery argument: one whose premise is that weapons should never be built, and that there is no justified use for them. The unfortunate reality of the world is that we do have and require militaries with intelligence agencies.
Based on the premise of your argument, the only non-slippery, internally consistent framework is that building weapons is universally and unambiguously bad.
It is a matter of degree which becomes a matter of kind. There is a difference between a bow and an arrow, a semi automatic and the atom bomb.
This is something I keep pondering over, for all the brilliant minds involved in the Manhattan project, did they ever think about the effects of what they created.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24740791
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25542949
Sometimes I fear people don't see the difference ethically based on HN discussions on other issues.
That goes 10x for nazification.
FWIW I don’t feel personally attacked here, and I accept that this is a contentious issue where hyperbole is likely to happen, but I really appreciate you being a mediating voice advocating for positive discourse rather than just shutting down all discussion that becomes contentious.
Edit: A bit surprised to see this comment flagged. What about HN's guidelines were violated by this response to the parent comment's allusion to Nazis?
This fucking matters. Letting corporations off the hook because they were just following orders enables genocide.
And you’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to presume anyone’s intentions.
...used to kill innocent people
> In 1937 IBM's tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process huge amounts of data. Its clients included the U.S. Government, during its first effort to maintain the employment records for 26 million people pursuant to the Social Security Act, and Hitler's Third Reich, for the tracking of Jews and other persecuted groups, largely through the German subsidiary Dehomag. The social security-related business gave an 81% increase in revenue from 1935 to 1939.
In a counterfactual world where IBM did not sell them the equipment, the Nazis still would have figured out a way to mass murder people. The Japanese and Stalin and Mao did not have access to IBM tech, but they still mass murdered people.
The parent post from a former employee suggests that Palantir is in a similar position:
> They build a federated search engine with a simple UI to make it accessible to a non-technical audience. That’s it.
That's not a value proposition that is beyond the realms of possibility for other companies to develop. So why does Palantir appear to engage with more unethical projects that other companies if it's not by having a low ethical standard? (Obviously I can only comment on what is public knowledge.)
If the technology is not truly required by the unethical client, then you are doing a good, by taking their money and providing technology they don’t need. Money they give is money they can’t spend for other stuff that they truly need.
They build a federated search engine with a simple UI to make it accessible to a non-technical audience. That’s it. Have a whole lot of data in different databases/data lakes? Palantir will let you search across all of it quickly and simply. They don’t source the data, they even hold the data, they install their servers on premise with where the data is already being stored, and import it.
It’s a specialized Google with very robust and configurable access controls that you can buy and run because you’ve collected more data than you know what to do with.
Now you may still be legitimately unhappy with them because of who they work with or the implication of making those entities more efficient in processing data, but given that HN is a technical audience I’d really hope that we can get over this trend of thinking Palantir has some magical data summoning abilities.