Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Preferable to China Winning the Al Race | Hacker News Reader

Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Preferable to China Winning the Al Race

gizmodo.com

38 pointsvoxadam29 comments

I'd prefer to think there are more possibilities than that.

> “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”

Lose your rights to Vance/Thiel or to China. Thank you tech community for giving us that.

Between those, which has significantly improved people’s lives more?

Neither?

China delivers affordable versions of everything only rich people would have if rich people had their way.

The true test will be if their locally run LLMs, while heavily sandboxed and whitelist-only network restricted, are useful to the average man. Might be worth some real respect

It certainly isn't Peter Thiel, Alex Karp or JD Vance. Nor is it the vast majority of "big tech" who have all undeniably made the world significantly worse for a few extra advertising dollars.

But, hey, I'm sure all the Meta engineers think they're doing transformative, important things and not just like, figuring out clever ways to give teenage girls depression faster.

> I'm sure all the Meta engineers think they're doing transformative, important things

I wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt at this point in time. A decade ago I would, but not now.

Yeah anyone who’s worked at meta in the last ten years I would not hesitate to label as a creep.

Disproportional surveillance is harmful, exploitive surveillance. The entire point of Palantir is to maximize that condition - a tool for powerful entities to snoop on us while they increasingly obscure their own behaviors.

We became a surveillance state in 2001, so in effect, Bin Laden won. [0] And don't forget, people sacrificed their lives so that the White House would not be partially demolished.

> FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to reveal the dramatic inside story of the U.S. government’s massive and controversial secret surveillance program–and the lengths they went to trying to keep it hidden from the public. Part one goes inside Washington to piece together the secret political history of “The Program,” which began in the wake of Sept. 11 and continues today

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/united-states...

"Bin Laden won" is a phrase you don't see too often; I tend to agree insofar as OBL managed to get the American nation to subvert itself.

The realisation they won is extremely important if the US is to ever recover from the last decades of civil rights and international credibility erosion. I don’t think it’ll happen though, and we’ll live to see the sunset of this empire.

The ossification appears irreversible.

Sauron Says Palantir Surveillance Preferable to Haradrim Winning the Horse Breeding Race

America becoming a surveillance state means China has won. If not in terms of global power, then certainly in terms of their ideology vs ours.

Wasnt he a philosophy major and lawyer? So he should know bad arguments like hasty generalization or false choice. I would argue that creating a survaliance state would increase china's likelihood of "winning", why would people choose the US or western values if they are essentially the same?

He knows. He also knows a lot of people will fall for it.

After reading this I don't understand the connection between surveillance and China. OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are developing AI without using it for surveillance. Whether they win the AI race or China does has nothing to do with Palantir.

You are right - the argument is designed to create a moral panic that allows further power grabs.

This is a false dichotomy, from someone who profits from such manufactured fear.

Surveillance state has already happened. His words aren't meant for the interviewer but for US senators and others in control of purse strings. Buy this or someone else will.

I am surprised to see Palantir's CEO to say such a thing!

Of course. They're in the surveillance data analisys business and deeply care if China wins.

"Man who sells surveillance equipment says US should become a surveillance state."

Nope.

Absolutely no.

That Thiels worldview is publicly displayed through unusually bad lit theory takes on behavior (Girard) uploaded in the impressionable post teen years and now is on display in phenomenally weird scifi takes on Old Testament theorizing from non-analytic (read mythological thought) opens a window into this perpetually teenaged patriarchal world view. These are all stunted boys who failed to develop a connected world view. They see castles and moats and firewalls and keeps full of gold and they simply assigned binary trickery to these metaphors and get giddy when rhapsodizing about how to get more. Time to lock up men.

Surveillance is the movie, radio, TV watching you. Not so prefereable.

He wants a lot more than that.

The patriarchy by way of Silicon Valley and Princeton et al is such a little boy stammering tantrum extended into surveillance and control. How this isn’t pondered as satire of primates running wild…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com