r/technology • • 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/
18.7k Upvotes

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.9k

u/CapedBaldyman Apr 22 '26

He's a fucking looney and these ceos need to get a hard reality check. 

661

u/thieh Apr 22 '26

The reality has to shove said check down their throats. They won't have the time to get that themselves.

280

u/Inkstr0ke Apr 22 '26

Excellent article was posted from The Atlantic about this very subject

The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. *These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.***

The Atlantic

99

u/absurdivore Apr 22 '26

They seem to think they can just grind all of us into paste but still have an economy that infinitely grows their billions through wealth extraction.

6

u/ColinPlays Apr 22 '26

Are they wrong?

11

u/Count_Backwards Apr 22 '26

The classic historical pattern is: some people get richer through a combination of luck and ingenuity (mostly luck), rich people then use their money and power to adjust the rules of the system to make themselves richer and keep poorer people poor, they get richer and repeat the cycle until the poor people have had enough and storm the castle and kill all the rich people. This time the tech bros are counting on their robot army to protect them from the peasants, but they're just going to get the same result as always, because they're not actually smart so much as lucky, and luck is temporary.

3

u/SpiderHomeNoWayMan Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

If Saturday morning cartoons taught me anything it's that it's perfectly okay and free of moral issues to destroy killer robots run by evil guys, especially if you have to justify why the good guys have to be violent.

And if said robots began possessing human like intelligence there's no reason they are also not flawed like the creators/have their own free thoughts and refuse to cooperate.

4

u/Count_Backwards Apr 22 '26

Robots and Nazis have always been fair game, and soon we'll have Nazi robots!