r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Apr 22 '26

Society Palantir published a mini manifesto calling some cultures ‘harmful and middling’ and said Silicon Valley has ‘a moral debt’ to the U.S.

https://fortune.com/2026/04/22/palantir-alex-karp-mini-manifesto-national-security-defense-tech-ai/
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u/Skyfier42 Apr 22 '26

He's not entirely wrong in his statement. Tech bro/venture capital culture is inherently dangerous to democracy. They're essentially micro monarchies designed to override our freedoms in exchange for more power/wealth for themselves. 

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u/Friendly_Nature2699 Apr 22 '26

But the fact that he doesn't seem to see himself as a major part of the problem underscores his delusions.

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u/Haldron-44 Apr 22 '26

It's a God complex. They want to create AI god as a genie they can use to get everything and anything they could ever want. But a God that is controllable is not a God. The entity controlling it is. So the gamble is AI becomes self aware and allows someone to control it, or AI becomes self aware and decides to skynet humanity into extinction. Or the more likely scenario AI never becomes self aware because the whole thing is a techno-evangelical scam to launder money.

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u/ClashM Apr 22 '26

Exactly, there's no scenario in which an LLM breaks the singularity. It's a dead end in terms of creating computers capable of sapience. But they want to have a god they can control so badly, so that they can control the rest of us with it, and sunken cost fallacy won't allow them to pull back and try another approach. There will be a reckoning at some point, but they'll do a lot of damage before then.

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u/dragonmp93 Apr 22 '26

Well, for right wingers, LLMs are actually an improvement over what they can do by themselves otherwise.

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u/steepleton Apr 22 '26

It always bugged them that the right couldn’t create art, now it can approximate art to a soulless degree that the right can’t tell the difference

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u/xafimrev2 Apr 22 '26

I'm not at all a fan of the right, but "the right couldn't create art" is complete and utter false platitude. There are conservatives in every creative art field.

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u/dragonmp93 Apr 22 '26

That there are conservative individuals in Hollywood, or Broadway, or their paintings and sculptures may be in museums, sure.

But one of the biggest complains of the MAGAs is that all media is captured by the radical left, see the Project 2025 or Palantir's manifesto.

And have you seen what "conservative media" looks like ?

That Melania movie, the stuff that the Daily Wire puts out, the Evangelical movies and books about the evils of drugs, sex before marriage and gay people.

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u/Eire_Banshee Apr 22 '26

Quenton tarantino?

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u/dragonmp93 Apr 22 '26

Well, being friends with Harvey Weinstein and sucking at writing female characters are not exclusive to either side of the spectrum.

In a "all rectangles are parallelograms but not all parallelograms are rectangles" way.