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Comment by mrlongroots | Hacker News Reader

Kitchen knives murder people. Toyota Hiluxes have powered more jihad than modern battle tanks. Our tastes, beliefs, and opinions as a society are shaped by recommendation algorithms run by facebook/instagram/twitter, to our profound detriment (personal opinion).

> And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.

To be clear, I absolutely agree. Plenty of tech is double-edged. And Palantir very much so.

Let me restate my point. Palantir (or that class of tech products) is powerful at enabling visibility over a complex system. But visibility is not decisions, it is an input to decisions. If you had real-time telemetry from every single stomach, you could maybe automatically dispatch drones with food wherever someone is starving. Or you could use the data as a high-frequency indicator for a successful invasion. Morality is downstream of decisions not data.

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Palantir is not double edged, technology is pretty much by definition an application and Palantir is applying in exactly one direction.

"oh it's just database joins" is about like me ripping your arms off and describing it as "chemical reactions"

No, you've only heard about one application of it. Airbus and Palantir built something so powerful they productized it and now sell it to airlines to help manage their fleet

https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-data...

They have a thriving commercial business outside of their government work. (Disclaimer: long PLTR)

That link is more marketing than substance. Is there any data on how well these models perform? For example, how well does their predictive maintenance work, how much risk-adjusted money savings does it provide, what data streams does it require?

> "oh it's just database joins" is about like me ripping your arms off and describing it as "chemical reactions"

This argument is both inconsistent and counterproductive.

Inconsistent as in, the harm to me from having my arms being ripped off comes from you deciding to effect the intent to harm me. No photograph or x-ray of my arms can produce the intent of wanting to harm me.

Counterproductive as in, the "good vs bad" framing is pointless because it does not help with solutions. If your solution is to ban joins, you will have a hard time gaining traction for your cause. Strategic advocacy requires understanding axes along which you may be able to produce a coherent argument and gain leverage. "Ban joins" does not help.

The root-cause of all of this isn't evil government, or data analytics, or joins, or even evil company.

Its data collection. Its privacy. If were waiting around for the day people start acting ethically, we'll experience the heat death of the universe.

Governments can always turn evil. Companies can always be compelled. People can always turn evil.

We need to not give them the ammunition. We've cornered ourselves into a situation where we sacrifice our data and privacy, and we are forced to blindly trust it will not be used against us.

If we do not collect data, we cannot have data breaches. If we do not collect data, we cannot have mass surveillance. If we do not collect data, we cannot have wiretapping.

We've simply allowed and encouraged tech companies to collect as much data as humanly possible. That starts with Google, Meta, et al. We then trust they will not abuse it.

But they certainly can, and they certainly will. What is done now cannot be undone. We cannot take back data immortalized. But, what we can do is prevent new data collection.

Use private services. Run software locally when feasible. Deny analytics. Block advertisments. Use end to end ecryption. Etc.

A good government having better information technology allows it to do more to serve our interests.

Palantir is still a tumor. We don't need people profiting off database joins, Oracle did that and became the most hated company on the planet. If the surveillance industry ends up resembling the other "rice bowl" military contractors, American taxpayers will suffer most. It will inevitably become a cost treadmill with infinite billable hours, Congress has seen this happen hundreds of times.

In truth, the rest of your arguement is fully correct. Palantir is often portrayed as the "hacking American businesses" group, but that's NSO. Palantir is merely buying out the data from morally-flexible telecoms and capricious cookie-laden websites. There is an uncomfortable truth about networked technology that America has swept under the rug for decades, and now we have entire businesses as a symptom of that failure. It's a sickening precedent for a free society.

I'd like to believe in a political solution to this. I've yet to see one, and the consequences of the Snowden leaks suggest we may never correct course here in America.

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