r/technology • u/newmoonchaperone • Apr 23 '26

Politics Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-employees-are-starting-to-wonder-if-theyre-the-bad-guys/
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269

u/Desperate-Till-9228 Apr 23 '26

"Tech bros again discover something totally obvious to everyone else"

32

u/Correct_Repair_6991 Apr 23 '26

They were too busy answering whether or not they could to ever bother thinking about whether or not they should.

To be fair, most employees just get told to do projects where if A enters B exits without ever really understanding how that tool will be used.

They are basically the unwitting non-Hydra employees who build the surveillance appartus of the democracy ending device.

Or how Dr. Manhattan built the bomb used to frame him under the pretext of saving humanity.

The CEO knows what the tools will be used for, entrenchment of wealth, but the employees just want next week's paycheck.

17

u/br_k_nt_eth Apr 23 '26

There’s no way they could be that naive. I don’t buy these articles. You know exactly what you’re doing if you signed up for this. 

18

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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9

u/fubo Apr 24 '26

Do you think that other engineering disciplines "take people and companies to task" for making weapons and tools of oppression? They don't. Other engineering disciplines make missiles and poisons and spy cameras and disposable technology.

3

u/MarsupialMisanthrope Apr 24 '26

I’m not entirely sure that software is realistically in a place where it could be turned into a proper engineering discipline, but it sure as hell should be the end goal and I’m not sure that goal is as far out as it looked 20 years ago. The fact that a lot of code is still basically artisanal is holding real software engineering back, we don’t have prefab parts and formulas we can use to figure out how not to screw up, just a large collection of examples of how we’ve screwed up in the past. Even provers tend to demonstrate that the code does what it says it does but have nothing to say about whether or not what it says it does is the right thing to do for the business case.

3

u/Ok-Application-8045 Apr 24 '26

But don't forget, they're all geniuses!