Comment by whymauri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whymauri | Hacker News Reader

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>What exactly do you think makes the company despicable, apart from them working with some entities you don’t like?

I mean, this is certainly enough for me.

The Gotham system and who Palantir decides to provide it to borders on dystopian. [0]

>The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer’s own observations on the subject.

This is terrifying.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

It’s just a search engine... and don’t get me wrong, it’s a really robust and expressive search engine, but all it’s doing is data analysis. As scary as that is (and it is absolutely scary), it’s not anything that someone couldn’t do with tableau, or with a whole lot more patience and data manipulation, straight elasticsearch.

Palantir makes that easier, sure, but at what point is a tool sufficiently generic so as to not be held accountable for what it’s used for? And if there is no amount of generalizability that absolves the author of software from what its used for, how do you square that against open source software?

Should the elasticsearch authors feel guilty if their software is used for something unethical as described here? No money is changing hands is one difference, but for a decision of morality does the payment matter?

To be clear, I don’t think there’s one right answer here. Different people will absolutely have different opinions, and that’s not the type of disagreement that’s likely to be swayed on a forum, I just wanted to provide you a different way to think about it, if you’re open to doing so.

Palantir is not being misused. LAPD is using Palantir for its intended purpose.

> A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, they are an unreliable guide to action, and it is often unclear whether events are past or future: what is not shown may be more important than what is selectively presented. Further, users with sufficient power can choose what to show and what to conceal: in The Lord of the Rings, all uses of palantíri influence the action through deception or misreading of what is shown. Commentators such as Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda.

This doesn't sound like the kind of device that should be sold to law enforcement, or anyone.

The entire point of this literary device is to show that the user does not actually understand what they are seeing leading to an incorrect assumption which ends in disaster. It's a cautionary tale, not something to be aspired to.

>It’s just a search engine

do you have any comment on this?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

How do you square using 'predictive policing' technologies on predominantly minority populations to forecast who will commit crime, which sounds somewhat like Minority Report, with "just a search engine"?

complete bs

I realize this is a technology forum, so it's popular to think about it in a very laser-focused kind of way where technology is neutral, and it's only the WAY that people use it is a problem, but over and over in society we have seen that this is simply not true.

Nuclear fission is politically and ethically neutral. An atomic bomb isn't.

A hunting rifle is politically and ethically neutral. A fully automatic assault rifle isn't.

A search engine is politically and ethically neutral. The way that Palantir packages and presents it and the use cases it optimizes for isn't.

Now, I realize that there are a million different grey areas and exceptions with all these subjects. You can murder people with a chef's knife, after all. I'm certainly not out here claiming that if something CAN be misused it should be banned.

I'm not even necessarily saying that something shouldn't be built OPTIMIZED for a particular use that some would consider unethical. There is always the very excellent argument that technology can't be repressed, and if you don't build "the thing", someone else will. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

But we all know that there are lines that are too far. I don't want to jump straight to Godwin's Law, but I would say we as society universally agree that it was indefensible for corporations to provide tools and technology to facilitate the holocaust and any form of genocide.

I am not saying that ICE or certain US police forces are comparable to Nazi Germany's organizations. But there is a spectrum. And somewhere on that spectrum there is a line. And the line needs to be incorporated and considered from a humanistic point of view - one of global ethics. (vs. national ethics such as "If the US does it it's not illegal/unethical").

And from that standpoint, myself, and many others, think Palantir's ethics and chosen way of business is way over where we draw the line.

> A hunting rifle is politically and ethically neutral. A fully automatic assault rifle isn't.

First, a hunting rifle is definitely not neutral. Vegetarians and vegans would like to have a word with you.

Second, an “assault rifle” implies select-fire automatic. Otherwise there is no difference between hunting rifles and rifles just painted black to look scary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle

Look, gun nuts can debate semantics until they're blue in the face.

I'm drawing a line between UTILITY and MURDER.

Vegetarians and Vegans may be absolutely right that in an evolved elevated humanity we shall no longer harm any other living creatures, but in the grand scheme of things there are ways to hunt that are humane, sustainable, and efficient. And there are weapons/guns optimized for this utility.

On the other hand there are weapons out there optimally designed for indiscriminate slaughter of other humans at close range.

> debate semantics until they're blue in the face.

> I'm drawing a line between UTILITY and MURDER.

The irony is so thick here, especially when you're talking about a search engine.

a search engine who's utility is abuse by fascist-adjacent paramilitary police organizations to round up immigrants, discriminate against minorities, and create a pipeline of non-violent drug offenders for the private prison system.

Yawn. A gun is designed to shoot bullets. The vast majority of guns are bought and never murder. A small minority of them are used to murder animals and an even smaller minority are used to murder people. Handguns make up the majority of that latter group.

I own a handgun to shoot bears and mountain lions that might try to put the moves on me when I’m deep in the Rockies. One of my friends hunts with an AR-15 body gun with no intention of ever using it on people (and it has no automatic mode). He has it because of the handy attachments.

Whatever classification you think exists to draw the line does not in reality.

all the evil companies use microsoft excel as well, does this make microsoft despicable?

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