Latest news with #TheTechnologicalRepublic
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
AI could unleash ‘deep societal upheavals' that many elites are ignoring, Palantir CEO Alex Karp warns
Amid the debate about AI's impact on the workforce, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the technology can have an overall additive effect, 'if we work very, very hard at it.' But he cautioned that if the industry doesn't make that happen, the result could be 'deep societal upheavals' that many elites are ignoring. There are already signs that AI is shrinking entry-level opportunities. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI revolution warned that the technology could also create massive fissures in society—unless the industry works hard to prevent them. Alex Karp, CEO of data-mining software company Palantir, was asked on CNBC on Thursday about AI's implications for employment. 'Those of us in tech cannot have a tin year to what is this going to mean for the average person,' he replied. That comes as AI increasingly gets incorporated into the daily tasks of workers, boosting their productivity and efficiency. At the same time, there are also signs that AI is shrinking opportunities for young workers in entry-level jobs that traditionally have been stepping stones for launching careers. Meanwhile, Palantir has been at the forefront of using AI at the enterprise level. The company is known for putting its AI-powered platforms to work in the defense and intelligence sectors, but it has also been expanding in the commercial space. Most recently, it partnered with TeleTracking, a provider of operations platforms for hospitals and health systems. On Thursday, Karp said the kind of AI that Palantir is doing can be 'net accretive to the workforce in America,' but only if 'we work very, very hard at it.' He pointed out that it just because it can happen, that doesn't mean it will happen. The industry has to make it so. 'We have to will it to be, because otherwise we're going to have deep societal upheavals that I think many in our elite are just really ignoring,' Karp said. The warning is especially notable coming from a leader in the AI field. But Karp has also urged the tech sector to take on bigger problems. In a recent Atlantic essay adapted from their book The Technological Republic, Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir's head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO, blasted Silicon Valley for focusing on 'trivial yet solvable inconveniences' and abandoning a long history of working with the government to tackle more pressing national issues. Others in the AI field have also offered dire predictions about AI and the workforce lately. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. In an interview with Axios, he said that displacement could cause unemployment to spike to between 10% and 20%. The latest jobs report on Friday put the rate at 4.2%. 'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,' Amodei said. 'It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it… We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.' And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this past week that AI agents are like interns, predicting that in the next year they can 'help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are very non-trivial.' Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the Milken Institute's Global Conference last month that while workers may not lose their jobs to AI, they will lose them to 'someone who uses AI.' This story was originally featured on
Mint
12-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
The best- or worst-timed book in history
The Technological Republic. By Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Crown Currency; 320 pages; $30. Bodley Head; £25 'SILICON VALLEY has lost its way." So says Alex Karp, co-founder and boss of Palantir, a supplier of software to Western armies and spooks. America's tech industry has forgotten about the armed forces' role in its creation, he frets. It shuns defence work and prefers to build frivolous consumer products, such as food-delivery apps and video-sharing platforms. No tech boss dares to take principled, unpopular positions such as, say, working on military technology (the author aside, of course). But now AI is here, and America's adversaries are racing to put it to military use. So as with nuclear weapons in the 1940s, when technologists worked hand-in-hand with government (thereby giving rise to Silicon Valley), their modern-day counterparts must do the same again to defend America. Alas, patriotism and a sense of civic duty have become unfashionable among a generation of technologists who distrust government and espouse naive pacifism. If only, Mr Karp laments, some brave technologist would step forward and show the way: for techies to become more patriotic and willing to develop military technology, and for governments to become more like the fast-moving, innovative tech industry. That is the argument advanced in 'The Technological Republic", co-written by Mr Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, a colleague at Palantir. Penned before the American election of November 2024, it has been published after it. Unlike many of his peers, Mr Karp endorsed Kamala Harris. With the victory of Donald Trump, however, many of the things that Mr Karp calls for have now happened—but not in the way he might have wished. Mr Karp is right that American techies could put their talents to better uses than trivial consumer apps. But his claim that they will not do military work is wide of the mark. Attitudes changed after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the shift accelerated after Mr Trump's election. Google reversed its ban on the military use of its AI technology in February. Investors are piling into defence-tech startups. Palantir's own share price hit a record high last month; today the firm's market capitalisation is around $174bn, about triple what it was a year ago. What of the idea that tech bosses will not take unpopular decisions? They have been doing so lately, seemingly to appease Mr Trump. (Nearly every Silicon Valley bigwig was at Mr Trump's inauguration.) Jeff Bezos of Amazon has pushed conservative viewpoints at the Washington Post, a newspaper he owns, causing an exodus of subscribers. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has attracted criticism for cutting back on fact-checking and calling for more 'masculine energy" in the workplace. As for the notion that Washington could use a dose of the 'move fast and break things" attitude of the tech industry, that too has come to pass, as Elon Musk chaotically applies shock therapy to the federal government. It is hard to say whether Mr Karp's timing is brilliant or terrible. His book has arrived just as many of the things he argues for have come true, but in unexpected ways—like a fairy tale in which the granting of a wish turns out to have unexpected drawbacks. The argument is filled out with a potted history of America's tech industry, quotes from luminaries, a fair amount of score-settling and quixotic excursions into what managers can learn from honeybees and improvisational theatre. The book's intellectual eclecticism is clearly modelled on that of Yuval Noah Harari, Silicon Valley's favourite historian. But 'The Technological Republic" is much less compelling. Mr Karp has got what he wished for, but he may not like the outcome. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
3 Books About Tech, Politics and Big Business
How, exactly, did Donald Trump win over the technology industry? How did the country's most future-minded companies — managed and staffed by immigrants, and led by C.E.O.s who had enthusiastically embraced corporate diversity policies — come to embrace a nationalistic, transactional view of power and a president whose scattershot trade war threatens their hugely profitable businesses? Put more simply: What happened to Silicon Valley? A tempting, and perhaps elegant, answer is Elon Musk. Even as his political activity seems to have cratered his bottom line, the Tesla and SpaceX C.E.O. continues to be idolized by wannabe moguls and studied closely by his peers. Other tech executives appear to ape Musk in all he does, from mass layoffs to bro-y podcast visits, and now, above all else, in supporting Trump. But three recent books on the relationship between business and government suggest that Musk's right-wing turn is probably more symptom than cause, the latest manifestation of reactionary forces that have long simmered, mostly unnoticed, within the tech industry, but are now suddenly on display for all to see. Unit X Blessedly, Musk is not the main character in UNIT X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War (Scribner, 319 pp., $30), a chronicle of efforts by the book's authors — Shah, an entrepreneur, and Kirchhoff, a tech adviser — to persuade Silicon Valley companies to make surveillance and weapons systems for the government, though Musk's SpaceX hangs in the background as the kind of state-backed capitalism that is good for the Pentagon. The book reveals how a left-leaning industry became enthusiastic about the military-industrial complex. When rank-and-file Google employees put up an early resistance to weapons work, Amazon and Microsoft saw an opportunity to double down on military contracts. At the same time, some tech leaders at companies like Palantir and Anduril were always on board. In his recent book 'The Technological Republic,' for instance, Palantir's C.E.O. and co-founder, Alex Karp, longs for the days when the Navy's ballistic missiles were made in the Bay Area and urges stronger ties between the government and Silicon Valley. Shah and Kirchhoff were hired to run the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (Unit X for short) shortly after its creation under Barack Obama in 2015. Their goal wasn't to turn Silicon Valley into an arm of the Pentagon, but rather to make inexpensive consumer technologies, like tablets and productivity software, easily available to the military. But, as 'Unit X' shows, it's not a huge leap to go from using A.I. to analyze drone footage (as the Defense Department proposed in Project Maven, a controversial program that Google withdrew from after employee protest) to using A.I. systems in weapons that are designed to kill (as is the case with the exploding drones developed by Anduril, a Unit X success story). Anduril, backed by another Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel, and staffed by several of Thiel's close allies, recently announced that it had agreed to take over an Army contract worth up to $22 billion. Given the company's close ties with the new administration, and the Musk-inspired political realignment in Silicon Valley, it seems almost certain there will be more money to come. Owned Tech industry reporters tend to view the power of Silicon Valley billionaires as a natural byproduct of their addictive apps. This leaves out a less flattering angle, in which their power is also the result of a sophisticated effort to buy off and bully potential critics. In OWNED: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left (Bold Type, 293 pp., $30), Higgins, a tech journalist, makes a compelling case that more attention should be paid to the campaign to influence their critics. He also renders tech moguls like Musk and Thiel as supporting players rather than leading men, focusing instead on two of the targets of their political patronage, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Greenwald and Taibbi were seen as leftists early in their careers, before turning to cater to right-wing audiences. Their evolution, Higgins argues, was spurred on by money from conservative sources. Greenwald is paid to produce videos on Rumble, the anti-woke video platform that counts Thiel and Vice President JD Vance as investors; Taibbi's move to the right coincided with his becoming, in Higgins's account, essentially an in-house journalist at Elon Musk's X. (Neither man's work is monolithic, as their reactions to more recent events have shown. Greenwald has been critical of the Trump administration's immigration policies; Taibbi ultimately fell out with Musk over his management of X.) The author approaches his subject with the zeal of a fan who has been disappointed by his heroes. Higgins was inspired to enter journalism, in part, by Greenwald's reporting on the National Security Agency's data collection programs and his role as a co-founder of the lefty news site The Intercept, where Higgins became friendly with Greenwald as a freelancer. Higgins acknowledges having felt the draw of the right-wing dollar himself, especially as a paid contributor to a short-lived podcasting company founded by a Trump-supporting venture capitalist. His account of such personal temptations is easily the best part of the book, showing how the enormous audiences that tend to follow Musk and his peers exert a gravitational pull as powerful as Musk's money. Profits & Persecution When Jeff Bezos revamped The Washington Post's opinion page and Mark Zuckerberg began tossing out Facebook fact checkers to embrace a system that aligned better with the new administration, it was hard to say whether these moves suggested that Bezos and Zuckerberg had finally revealed their true selves, or whether they had changed tack because it seemed inadvisable to do otherwise. (It's worth remembering that last summer, while running for president, Trump threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison for life and that Zuckerberg's company is on trial for alleged antitrust violations.) Of course, either possibility is grim, as are the parallels one can find in PROFITS & PERSECUTION: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 215 pp., $29.99), by Hayes, a Holocaust scholar. Studying the relationship between the Nazi state and about 100 of the largest German companies, Hayes rebuts familiar narratives that cast the German business elite as either racist true believers or unwitting victims of Nazi aggression. He convincingly shows that German businessmen were skeptical of the Nazis, but tended to approach Hitler's rise with an eye to the bottom line, seeking to preserve their financial advantages within the regime and, in doing so, slowly acquiescing to its most insidious demands. His book is both horrifying and riveting, in part because the rationalizations offered by business leaders will sound eerily familiar. Germany's corporate class was far more concerned by Weimar overregulation of the labor markets than they were by Hitler's racism. They assumed that with some combination of minimal compliance (pushing a few Jews out of their executive ranks) and a show of political loyalty, they could bring Hitler around to 'sane views,' as board members of the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben put it in the early 1930s. Of course, these impulses ultimately helped prop up a government that eroded the independence of the corporate class and destroyed the free-market capitalism it once sought to protect. Once the new order was in place, it seemed only natural to respond to the Nazi intimidation of Jewish-owned competitors by offering to buy up those businesses for a tiny percentage of their true worth, or, during the war, to respond to a labor shortage by embracing the Nazi practice of conscripting laborers and working them to death. 'In the context created by confiscatory government policy, maneuvering in self-defense easily elided into actions that seemed — and were — cruel and rapacious,' Hayes writes. This history is a warning less to the moguls than to the rest of us. Germany's big businesses profited thanks to their collaboration, and after the war most executives essentially escaped blame, keeping much of the plundered wealth even after millions died. In many respects, Hayes makes clear, they won the war, even when Germany lost.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Palantir Executive Responds to Criticism Over $30 Million ICE Surveillance Contract
Palantir Technologies (PLTR, Financials) defended its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham criticized the company over a $30 million contract to build a deportation-tracking system. The system, called the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System or ImmigrationOS, is designed to help ICE identify people for deportation and monitor self-deportations, according to federal filings. Graham posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, It's a very exciting time in tech right now. If you're a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state. Ted Mabrey, Palantir's global head of commercial, responded online, writing, I'm looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post. While Mabrey did not address the specifics of the ICE contract, he said Palantir's work with the Department of Homeland Security began after the 2011 killing of U.S. federal agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas cartel. When people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work, he said. He compared the current backlash to the protests over Google's involvement in Project Maven, a military drone image analysis program that sparked employee pushback in 2018. Google has subsequently signaled that it's become more open to defense work again, Mabrey said. Palantir, which has been recruiting on college campuses, has used slogans like a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Mabrey encouraged potential applicants to read CEO Alexander Karp's book The Technological Republic, which calls for stronger ties between the tech industry and government. We hire believers, Mabrey wrote. Not in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself. Graham responded by asking Palantir to commit publicly to not building tools that violate the U.S. Constitution. But I'm hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he'll say I didn't sign up for this' and refuse, he wrote. Mabrey called the question the will you promise to stop beating your wife' court room parlor trick, but said Palantir had already made similar pledges. We have made this promise so many ways from Sunday, he wrote, adding that the company's 3,500 employees are grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Palantir exec defends company's immigration surveillance work
One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir's work. The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration's aggressive deportation strategy — is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it's calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering 'near real-time visibility' into self-deportations. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham shared headlines about Palantir's contract on X, writing, 'It's a very exciting time in tech right now. If you're a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.' In response, Palantir's global head of commercial Ted Mabrey wrote that he's 'looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post.' Mabrey did not discuss the specifics of Palantir's current work with ICE, but he said the company started working with the Department of Homeland Security (under which ICE operates) 'in the immediate response to the murder of Agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in an effort dubbed Operation Fallen Hero.' 'When people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work,' Mabrey said. He also compared Graham's criticism to protests over Google's Project Maven in 2018, which eventually prompted the company to stop its work analyzing drone images for the military. (Google has subsequently signaled that it's become more open to defense work again.) Mabrey urged anyone interested in working for Palantir to read CEO Alexander Karp's new book 'The Technological Republic,' which argues that the software industry needs to rebuild its relationship with the government. (The company has been recruiting on college campuses with signs declaring that 'a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.') 'We hire believers,' Mabrey continued. 'Not in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself. Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.' Graham then pressed Mabrey to 'commit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution,' though he acknowledged in another post that such a commitment would have 'no legal force.' 'But I'm hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he'll say 'I didn't sign up for this' and refuse,' Graham wrote. Mabrey in turn compared Graham's question to 'the 'will you promise to stop beating your wife' court room parlor trick,' but he added that the company has 'made this promise so many ways from Sunday,' starting with a commitment to 'the 3500 enormously thoughtful people who are grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day as they see first hand what we are actually doing.'
