In our quaint digital age, where algorithms dance like blood red autumn leaves in a Connecticut defense contractor parking lot, Wall Street’s hawks circle with their familiar hunger. The same men who once counted bombs and the resulting shelters as sound investments now spy big profits in the artificial minds that dream of checkpoints and dusty hellfire clouds.
The latest dispatches tell us, with that peculiar modern detachment, how these digital oracles known as Palantir-blessed cybernetic God and prophets default to visions of violence, as predictably as teenage boys returning to thoughts of glory: the worst possible bet.
All these AIs are supported by Palantir… [with] demonstrated tendencies to invest in military strength and to unpredictably escalate the risk of conflict – even in the simulation’s neutral scenario.
How perfectly American, how very Stanford, the marriage of silicon and savagery. Palantir, a strange tail that wags a militant dog, darling of the defense establishment. It carries its baggage like a suburban housewife’s guilt, firing off extra-judicial mistargeted killings like errant golf balls into ponds, privacy violations as casual as country club gossip, political extremism worn like a Brooks Brothers suit. They peddle their digital Trabants to a market drunk on its own mythology, these latter-day merchants of chaos whose every misstep is rebranded as innovation.
The Wall Street wisdom here recalls nothing so much as those bright young men of the 1960s who saw profit in stuffing suitcases of blood stained decolonization dollars into napalm futures. They chase Palantir’s promise like suburban developers pursuing the perfect sundown town cul-de-sac, even as the company pours resources into the digital void with the abandon of a lottery addict. The irony sits heavy as New England humidity, that in our quest to predict a fictionalized cartoonist future, we’ve invested in unpredictability itself, a paradox that would be amusing if it weren’t so damnably dangerous and deadly.
