Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

The world is very techy these days. Someone is going to do the business where tech, AI and defence interact, and it happens to be Palantir.

So... is the complaint that a company fills this niche, or is it that of all possible companies doing this business, Palantir is particularly immoral?

I'm not sure it is possible for effectively a (cyber-)weapon producer to say, ah youre using our weapons immorally, we wont sell them to you. This is the domain of government regulation and export control.

So I personally wouldnt expect the contractor in this space to stand up to some high moral standard. I think the best we can hope for is compliance with laws, and there's your problem. US doesnt care how badly people get abused by the weaponry it exports, so long as IP and military secrets aren't leaked. Palantir is safe from US regulation.

Are other countries better? Some for sure. Germany blocked Eurofighter exports on ethical grounds. I'm not judging if they were right or wrong, but merely that they forewent cash for ethical points.

But most will sell anything to anyone, so long as the price is right.

Im not saying Palantir is a nice cuddly company, only, hate the game not the player.

That is a completely false premise.

The game would not exist if there were a consensus among players to not play.

Technically, this is not linear as you argue, instead, this is a feedback loop. The game influences the actors, the actors influence the game.

To prevent an unwanted outcome, you must interrupt the loop at an arbitrary point of your choice.

You're saying SV (& co) should convene some kind of gentleman's agreement that they should all leave a massive, profitable, legal, intellectually interesting niche with a stable customer base, because its immoral - perhaps.

Can you think of a single other industry where this worked? It seems implausible to me that it would.

Okay, here we go: No, I am not saying anything you said.

This was not about a gentleman's agreement at all - that was a rhetorical figure to demonstrate that it is not the game which is at fault, it’s both. The behaviour of the game and the behaviour of the actors in that game, and almost in any other game is not an input -> output scenario, but instead, the output of the loop will be the input of the exact same loop. That is the definition of a feedback loop. It’s all recursion.

By shifting the responsibility to the ominous “game”, which is just another term for a system, you exclude the elements of a system from being part of the system itself.

There is a whole branch of science occupied with this. System Dynamics, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and whatnot. The argument that actors in a system are decoupled from the system or the environment as in a closed system approach is factually wrong. Apart from laboratories, there is practically no closed system on this planet.

The phrase “hate the game not the player” is cybernetic nonsense with the sole purpose of giving up responsibility. It does not matter that it gets repeated more often than not. It won’t be correct, no matter how many times the figure is used.

The weapons industry in general this fits, for example anti-personnel mines. Massive, profitable, legal, intellectually interesting...?

But yes, I don't care about Palantir, but my country buys this shit and I want the ones responsible to take responsibility for that.

Wow, Americans will support anything for a company. The mental gymnastics is absurd for love of the corporates.

Palantir is doing in reality, not someone else. So come to reality and say who is evil in reality not in some hypothetical world.

If another company does it in future then say that company is evil when that actually happens.

It's very simple. But immoral people will think too hard to make things complex to support a immoral company.

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