this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.

Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.

After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.

"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”

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[–] Fingolfinz@lemmy.world 32 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

That company and the engineers are soulless monsters

[–] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Devil's Advocate (damn near literally this time around)

Try being a young engineer at the top of your game and saying no to an offer where the yearly salary makes google engineers jealous. Not everyone can say no.

Palantir offers like 400k/year to run-of-the-mill forward deployed engineers for foundry (Civilian platform) where the job is 99% actually helping customers with interesting engineering problems.

I can't even imagine what they are offering folks working on gotham (govt/military side.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while a ton of those engineers are soulless sociopaths, some of them just took a job that pays super well and they don't personally align with the goals of the C-levels. And in fact - a ton won't even know what those goals are.

Remember - Our enemy is the c-suite, not the level 1 support agent. Even at evilcorp. Thankfully I am in a position where my kids are grown up and the money treadmill isn't set on hardmode for me anymore. I can say no. But even for me it is sometimes difficult.

[–] Fingolfinz@lemmy.world 2 points 31 minutes ago

Yeah well I don’t really give a fuck. I never became a class traitor for money and don’t forgive anyone who has

[–] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

How do you go from « saying no to cash » to « c-levels are the issue » in the context of ethical considerations for engineers that enable AI in military industrial complex?

The proverbial prospect engineer definitely decides that lives he will impacts are less relevant than his salary. That’s ethics & morality… and a seasoned AI engineer can certainly eat well enough in any other industry.

[–] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 3 minutes ago) (1 children)

How do you go from « saying no to cash » to « c-levels are the issue » in the context of ethical considerations for engineers that enable AI in military industrial complex?

I am not sure I get what this word soup is saying. No offense intended but maybe try re-wording this if you want to discuss.

PS: foundry is not an AI platform, the engineers I am talking about are usually 20-ish year old java and python devs, and it is easier to understand how someone in that group might not even know how evil evilcorp is.

[–] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Try to read it slowly maybe?

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Frankly a lot of engineers are soulless and their only north star is profit and lawsuits.

[–] AnalogNotDigital@lemmy.wtf 5 points 10 hours ago

Yeah seriously most engineers I've ever met have a chronic case of sociopathy.