The first time I heard this term was in this post from Naked Capitalism, but it sounds right. The article focuses on Palantir and an “alliance” between the US government and tech companies (particularly Palantir) and the Israeli government and tech companies. Palantir does indeed seem sinister. The events in Xinjiang were the first time I had heard of the idea of “social credit scores” to track and control large masses of people, and the events in Gaza take this concept to a new level of (I’m just going to say it) abhorrent violence and immorality.

I read a book once, and I can’t remember or find the title, making the point that these systems for ranking and controlling people go back to at least the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. If you think about it, the religious authorities of the time would have been the only ones (in their society I mean) with access to the technology and skills needed, such as paper, quills, ink, and literacy. Move on to Tsar, Gestapo, Stasi, and J. Edgar Hoover, and similar ends were accomplished with typewriters and file folders. So it was probably inevitable that modern computerized database technology, and now machine learning technology, would take this to a new level.

And these technologies have many peaceful democratic and economic uses, so we would not want to put this genie back in the bottle even if we could. I also think that as cyber- and bio-weapons of mass destruction become increasingly accessible and dispersed in many more hands, this kind of surveillance will become necessary to manage these risks, which are existential. So the only real options here are to have political controls on the misuse of these technology in democratic societies, and to have updated and strengthened international institutions akin to the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons control regimes of the past. At the moment, of course, it seems we are going down a dark path of increasingly sinister domestic surveillance with weakening democratic controls, along with weakening international controls. And I don’t know that governments focused on misusing these technologies to oppress their own citizens are going to be the ones most effective at also using them to manage the existential risks.

The International Atomic Energy Agency does in fact have a new(ish) AI-powered surveillance system called MOSAIC designed by…Palantir.

The Palantir, of course, was a crystal ball that figures in the Lord of the Rings. Created by the wise elves, who sure were somewhat elitist and mildly racist, but had the best interests of us common humans at heart overall. But the Palantir fell into the wrong hands and was misused by the forces of darkness. Only wizards and hobbits can save us now.