The Palantir Foundation

A nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing national security through technical research, support of emerging technologies, and policy development.

[The Palantir Foundation @palantirfound]

A new essay from Nicholas Zamiska, our board director and co-author of The Technological Republic, published in @newcriterion.

A brief summary with excerpts below.

1. It feels as if war is on the rise. And yet it isn’t. Our country’s national power, for all of the challenges of wielding it justly, has been an enormously benevolent, and indeed pacifying, force in the world over the past century.

2. The allure of soft power alone is not enough. The unwavering assumption that the moral appeal of liberal-democratic regimes, including our own, would, without military investment, win over our geopolitical adversaries and prompt the end of war has been a mistake.

3. A far more radical reshaping of Europe’s military capabilities is required. The starting point for the articulation of a strategy would be to assume that an alliance of any two out of the three largest and wealthiest European democracies—that is, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France—should be capable of decisively repelling a land invasion by Russia of Eastern Europe without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons or relying on material support from the United States.

4. In the United States, an ambivalence remains among subsets of Silicon Valley engineers in investing and building the next generation of defense capabilities. And yet is there no place for some degree of deference to our democratic system, in which policymakers appointed by officials elected by the public, and within constraints imposed by the Constitution, determine what is and is not in the national interest? Why should our nation’s largest technology companies displace the wisdom and verdict of the American people?

5. We essentially shrug as a society when the technology giants build entire business models around what amounts to an Orwellian consumer surveillance state. And yet the construction of software that advances our national security, including artificial-intelligence systems—software that gives U.S. forces a decisive advantage over our adversaries—that we have built at Palantir becomes a political flashpoint.

6. Some of the largest technological empires in the history of human civilization are essentially advertising companies. The irony is that those who resist further investment in defense and are most skeptical of collaboration between the technology sector and the state have often simply incentivized the hordes of technical talent and capital rushing to the software industry to pursue far less fraught endeavors, optimizing advertising algorithms and developing ostensibly novel ways of sharing videos and photographs on our phones, fostering arms races of other sorts, for likes and clicks.

7. We should, as a culture, be wary of rewarding those who instinctively prize the path of least resistance. If you have no unpopular views, if you sense no areas of divergence between yourself and those around you, even those whom you hold dearest, you might not have many authentic views at all.

8. Several generations now of ambitious and talented minds across the country have recoiled from public life and turned away from government work. The risk is that the Kennedys of today, the flawed and complex yet rich personalities who may have something to offer our fragile experiment in self-government, simply find their way to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Google.

9. The unforgiving scrutiny to which we subject those in public life may have simply yielded less than we hoped. We are left instead with what often seems to be an odd roster of seemingly empty vessels, opportunists looking for a cause and seeking higher office.

https://t.co/9103wc7UeB

[The Palantir Foundation @palantirfound]

Speed, not scalpels.

Former Minister of Economy for Lithuania Rimantas Zylius shares how AI can unlock Europe’s regulatory gridlock:
https://t.co/mJf5bEI5Au

[The Palantir Foundation @palantirfound]

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