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Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys (www.wired.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 55 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Crazy how long it takes for supposedly extremely brilliant scientists and engineers working at Evil LLC to realize that maybe their work is a net loss for humanity.

It's almost as if... they just didn't care and pretended to realize their mistakes once everything was well exposed. It's like reading obviously satirical scientists' memos in Resident Evil. Except it's real life and they're not satire.

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  • [–] 41 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    There's also the function of needing a job to survive and cognitive dissonance.

    I.e. "I'm not killing anyone I just do xyz and then other people use it to do bad things, not my responsibility"

    It is lying to themselves, but that's how it happens

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    You can only make that claim for so long. These aren't Amazon deliver drivers we're talking about. The developers and higher ups at Palantir could easily find another job somewhere else.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago*

    The job market in tech is not good right now, so they may not. I have a friend who is a dev and was getting heavily recruited by Palantir because he had a clearance already. The money was really good, and he was at the cusp of taking the job because he had been ghosted by other companies for months and only had a handful of interviews after being laid off six-ish months ago. Luckily, another place gave him an offer for a bit lower compensation, which he took. If that other place didn't come through, though, I think he would have gone with Palantir so that he could get some income.

    ETA: That said, Palantir is evil, and my friend was in that position because of the BS that is the US economic system, which is perpetuated by the people at Palantir.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I just think a lot of them don't think about the actions of their companies and are more focused on their income and promotion opportunities

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Don't forget the Stanford Prison Experiment. The problem is the CEOs aren't like the psychologist running the experiment who brought it to an end when he realized it went too far.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I used to write unethical software for marketing men. Now I don't.

    I've straight up told recruiters I don't want to contribute to the brown skeleton factory.

    I did that at the cost to my employment options.

    Its really, really hard to go work for Evil Inc and not realise you're a bad person.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Those companies have extremely well developed propaganda machines. They have to sell their technology and products as benefits to governments (i.e. society) and solutions to chaos (i.e. crime and terrorism), and they have extremely well refined language to describe themselves in positive term. If you don't look past the company line, it's easy to believe that the skeptics and warnings are all just FUD from haters, especially when the propaganda pays your mortgage.

    Then Palantir goes and publishes an actual fascist manifesto...

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Grime calculus that is modern ethics. One of the funniest examples to me is Russia Orthdoxy, the Iranian ayatollah, and American Evangelicals all claiming each other in vary amounts being the forces of Satan and The Gays.

    Again dark humor to me. They are monsters excusing the oppression and murder of people though, but when fighting Satan muders ok./s

    Plenty of secular satans out there too. Communists, Nazis, The Jews, Blood thirsty anarchists, narcists, billionaires, schisos, etc basically any polball or Jreg character. They can be used to justify some horrendous deviation from morality and ethics. You know killing baby hilter kind of stuff. Reeducation camps are ok if they're "terrorists" and the government is moved by the will of the people. Etc. etc.

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