Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons by Alexander Karp of Palantir

> While other countries press forward, many Silicon Valley engineers remain opposed to working on software projects that may have offensive military applications, including machine learning systems that make possible the more systematic targeting and elimination of enemies on the battlefield. Many of these engineers will build algorithms that optimize the placement of ads on social media platforms, but they will not build software for the U.S. Marines.

> I fear that the views of a generation of engineers in Silicon Valley have meaningfully drifted from the center of gravity of American public opinion

This is not new. See the emergence of the Technocracy Movement as a reaction to runaway capitalism/great depression. I wish that history was taught in engineering/science schools.

There was a recognition of the constant tension between the waste minimizing/innovation chasing Engineer and the Profit maximizing Manager/Capitalist.

The movement was seen to offer more realistic solutions than communism (which expected the masses to rule - the masses always just end up emulating the exploiters they replace).

It didnt gain traction cuz the tools available back then, to the tecnical class, to take on and reshape exploitative/wasteful power strutures, were rudimentary. Today its a very different story.

The technical class is much more powerful (lots of people in power have to dance to their tunes out of a dependency) yet the technical class is still totally unorganized and lacking any common vision on the future of society.

The moment that changes the choices wont be limited to miltech/fintech/adtech but something much larger.

But to imagine what that is, the technical class needs to step back from choices other places in front of them.

> It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work.

Wowie! Someone should look into this!