Palantir CEO Makes Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power (opens in new tab)

You can see a clip of the video of what he said here:

https://x.com/atrupar/status/2032087538802848156

To be honest it is a little bit hard to follow exactly what point he is trying to make, he doesn't communicate it very clearly.

The gist of it seems to be that he believes the job disruption will be greater among women (who are the slight majority of all professional workers -- but to me it seems AI is going to disrupt tech the most, which is generally still much more male dominated, so I'm not really sure why he believes AI labor disruption is likely to disempower women more).

Also not really sure how he believes that male/vocational workers will be lifted up, unless he means just relative to knowledge workers who just lose their jobs or take massive pay cuts. I happen to think if the job disruption for knowledge workers is anywhere near as bad as some predict, it won't be great for vocational workers either as it will both limit their demand (a large part of their potential customers will have less ability to hire them) and additionally they will find themselves with more competition for their own jobs as knowledge workers attempt to retrain for still-relevant jobs.

I'm Danish and like every other western country Palantir want's to mass survailance us (and we apparently sadly want them to do it too despite the whole Greenland thing). I can't tell you how it'll shift power from the cultural elite to the working class because that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing AI shift power from the cultural elite, and, the working class to the technical/financial elite.

It does so with survailance and information. In a free democratic society you can jaywalk when no car is around and be ok. In a survailance state, you can't, because it'll hurt your social credit score. Similar to what we see in certain Asian countries, effectively making you a B class citizen. Jaywalking is just an example of course, because we've agreed that is technically illegal but basically every human when confronted with a situation like that outside of bureaucracy will think it's ok you crossed the completely empty road. They won't think it's ok if the road wasn't empty. Which is the nuance in the system, that the survailance bureaucracy doesn't have.

I like to think of it in dungeons and dragons alignments. Democracy is in the neutral zone, perhaps with a slight chaotic basis, but over all you don't want it to be either too lawful or too chaotic. If it goes too far either way the other side will suffer. The reason it can be a little biased toward chaotic is because chaotic people don't try to force their way on lawful people quite as much as the other way around.

I guess more working class men in America are lawful? Over all though, the people with the power will be the people with the information and the wealth to impact the bureaucracy.

The explanation is much the same as for Peter Thiel’s ravings about the antichrist: there is no plausible explanation. The truth value of the claim is irrelevant, but it’s intended to influence a particular audience. Same goes for much of what Trump says.

No, but this is irrelevant. Of course, people don't believe that the billionaire class is aligned with the working class, which is why billionaires buy up media outlets to align public opinions with their goals. I think that a comparison with historical fascism is indeed appropriate here. Historical fascism saw itself as a workers' movement, but only insofar as workers were more easily exploited for the goals of an counter-cultural elite than the educated middle classes. Karp and Thiel may well have come to the same conclusion by observing the current US politics. And just as historical fascists recognized the disruptive force of the new mass media at their time, so do Karp and Thiel.