When I started working on this video about Palantir, I didn’t expect that it would make me want to have a panic attack. Then again, maybe panic is the appropriate response to learning that an artificial intelligence and surveillance company is actively collecting data on every American citizen in order to establish a technological dystopia.
In this week’s video I start out by examining the 2010 thought experiment “Roko’s Basilisk” which posits that if a future a malevolent AI want to secure its eventual existence, it might act retroactively to blackmail people in the present to help create it or suffer eternal torture in the future. If that sounds confusing: it is. But it’s a kind of deterministic AI theory that carries enough weight in techno-futurist circles that some people believe that it’s already happening.
Personally, I think it’s just philosophical gobbledygook. Unfortunately, this nonsense is also turning into reality through companies like Palantir. According to their own documents and public statements Palantir works with the government to turn digital violence into real violence, render citizens to black sites, and establish what their founder Alexander Karp calls the “Digital Kill-Chain.”
If that doesn’t look like a future of choosing between obeying in advance and eternal torture, I don’t know what does.
But wait, it gets even weirder.
In the course of my reporting I came across research by The Common Coalition that made the case that Palantir could have had a role in subverting the 2024 election and handing it to Trump. The evidence that they put together—from statistical anomalies in voting data, to potential mechanisms for flipping election software as well as direct connections between Palantir and election hardware—are potentially convincing if, also, circumstantial. Helping their case was Donald Trump stating that Elon Musk “knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.” Which to me seems like a tacit acknowledgement that Musk might have been involved in circumventing the will of the voters.
Then again, it also sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory. So what should we really believe? I hope my video provides some answers to the conundrum.
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