Only a few days ago, Vance was on a podcast defending Trump’s proposed Palantir-powered #database on every citizen,
which was described by MSNBC as
“an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans”.
Vance waved away any such concerns:
“I don’t believe that Palantir is collecting any information.”
Thank heavens for everyone’s freedoms, Palantir is run by self-confessed “classic liberal” Alex Karp.
In a recent earnings call, the idiosyncratic CEO said his company was busy
“building really great things”, in order “to power the west to its obvious innate superiority”.
Karp throbs with what he calls “productive narcissism”
– at Palantir, he insists:
“We’re proud of our moral stance”.
His philosophy, as he sums it up, is this:
“If you’ve done something big and important, you’re probably a good person.”
Palantir is successful, ipso facto, it’s doing good.
As the Economist put it:
🔥“Fast approaching is a might-is-right world.”
It’s a kind of Gordon Gekko morality
that would be heartily approved of by Wall Street legend
and Bilderberg faithful Henry Kravis of KKR,
on whom Gekko was actually based.
Of course, not all the tech luminaries at this year’s Bilderberg are thinking in terms of world #domination.
Demis Hassabis,
the co-founder of DeepMind, turned up in Stockholm with the 2024 Nobel prize for Chemistry in his back pocket
and some rather more optimistic rhetoric about #AI,
which he thinks will usher in an era of
“radical abundance”.
He thinks of AI as “the cavalry”
arriving to save us from ourselves.
He says:
“I’d be very worried about society today if I didn’t know that something as transformative as AI was coming down the line.”
And Jack Clark,
the co-founder of Anthropic,
likes to think AI replacing us in every last occupation will help us find new ways of living fulfilling lives.
His vision is of a world in which, freed up from our jobs, we’ll engage in
“creative, fun exercises in getting AIs to build things,
or make things,
or carry out competitions and games
where people can play them with one another”.