Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan

Re:Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan by tweetle_beetle on Friday January 22, 2021 @11:22AM (#25872984)

With great power comes great responsibility, including moral. The isn't the first time technology can have far reaching positive and negative applications, and it certainly won't be the last. Palantir has made commercial choices that are hard to stomach and they should have to deal with being considered a boogeyman of tech, even it's not the technology's "fault". It may not be "all-seeing" but it appears to be happy to look at any data for any reason.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History

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Re:Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Friday January 22, 2021 @11:31AM (#25873089)

The IBM example gets brought up a lot, but the real solution to the Nazis was nation states going to war against them and defeating them .

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.

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Re:Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan by tweetle_beetle on Friday January 22, 2021 @12:01PM (#25873457)

You're absolutely right, but if the technology you sell is not even truly required by an unethical client like those mentioned, then there is even less reason to engage with them.

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.)

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Re:Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Friday January 22, 2021 @12:11PM (#25873598)

> but if the technology you sell is not even truly required by an unethical client like those mentioned, then there is even less reason to engage with them.

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.

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Re:Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan by tweetle_beetle on Monday January 25, 2021 @09:12AM (#25903268)

The idea of ethics is based on having some level of shared values. If we act collectively we can promote these values. In this case, if we collectively disagree with something then we can "punish" it by not engaging with it commercially. I'm not sure how the abstract sabotage suggested makes any difference if the reasoning behind it isn't expressed - giving someone exactly what they want is hardly a great long term motivator for change.

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