Palantir's "Kill Chain" and the Dark Side of Artificial Intelligence – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.this is a video about Palunteer the most terrifying and bloodthirsty tech company on the planet our product is used on occasion to kill people but before we get there I want to go back in time to July of 2010 when two people on the geek forum less wrong got into an argument about the future of artificial intelligence which resulted in the thought experiment called Roko's basilisk now as a warning if you haven't heard of Roko's Basiliska before then I wouldn't blame you if you want to go skip to the next video in your queue because some people believe that merely knowing about this idea is enough to doom you to an eternity of hellish torture at the hands of a malevolent AI overlord so skip ahead if you need to but if not and you're still here let's get into it roko's Basilisk argues that artificial intelligence by its very nature is all but destined to achieve dominance over the planet by accelerating its own computational powers into a self-reinforcing cycle where it grows exponentially this is what's known as the singularity but the biggest hurdle to achieving this goal is the time that it takes to reach that super powerful form the internet user Roko believed that it was possible for a non-existent artificial intelligence to will itself into existence from the future by blackmailing the humans of today now specifically this would mean that an AI would torture anyone who didn't spend every possible resource in the present day to bring about its existence in the future it's merely by learning about this idea of Roko's basilisk you are either doomed to an eternity of torture or you must spend your life making sure that the torturer becomes a reality now if that all sounds a little convoluted to you yeah you would be right because it reverses causality and posits that an effect can come before a cause and yet this idea has traction among a certain segment of the technological oligarchy particularly among a community known as effective altruists or alternatively accelerationists who advocate for a reckless advancement of technology above all other considerations but even if Roko's basilisk is not real and that there isn't a timetraveling or at least time influencing AI in the future people might still be unwittingly bringing this technology into existence anyway and this is where Palunteer sits at something of a crossroads this one super powerful artificial intelligence company has won billions of dollars in government contracts and despite its administrations to the contrary almost definitely centralizes all personal data on every person alive today into a single repository that they control now we already know that its algorithm and mass surveillance capabilities can both predict what individuals might do next and track their movements in real time paired with lethal military hardware and detention facilities and black sites run by the government it looks a lot like every evil omni corporation in pulp science fiction books from Skynet to ECorp the people are realizing they don't have freedom of choice so long as you exist the people are waking up no longer accepting their economic slavery but wait it gets worse i looked up the original post by the user Roo and found that there was more to the bassilisk than the eerie blackmail proposition that YouTubers and the media have generally focused on the original title before it was taken down by the site's admin for being an existential risk to its readers was quote solutions to the altruist's burden the quantum billionaire trick it's mostly philosophical gobblygook just take this sentence for example this seems to be what CEV coherent exploitated volition of humanity might do if it were an aausal decisionmaker and with a footnote that goes underneath it to explain what that means but you know I can almost puzzle out what it was trying to say but I'm not sure it's worth it the post doesn't even mention the word basilisk a single time the moniker actually came a few months later when another user said that the argument resembled the Greek mythological creature whose mere gaze can turn a person to stone and as an aside I first learned about a basilisk in while playing Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and it's a hell of a monster anyway after briefly describing the AI's blackmail plot Roko pivots to the inexplicable rise of Elon Musk as a titan of industry and his plan to colonize Mars roko holds Elon up as an ideal and says that everyone who thinks that this basilisk idea is plausible should attempt to become a tech billionaire themselves in his image by trusting in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics and that interpretation of physics is what fuels the Marvel universe as well as Rick and Morty where every possible outcome of any action spawns an entirely new universe into a multiverse and Roo's logic goes that if there's an infinite number of outcomes for any action then if you place a $30,000 bet on a random stock there is a future somewhere that that stock will go up like 10,000% and make you a Muskian billionaire who can invest in dominant AI technology and that the act of doing that investment will save you from eternal torture yeah it's a ludicrous idea that compounds speculation on pseudo logic with an outlier theory in physics but one thing that does catch my attention is the idea that Musk is so central to the AI singularity and that the basilisk wager that he will be favored by our future AI overlords indeed there's a whole cohort of tech billionaire accelerationists who are the good guys in this future where AI is actually in the business of torturing its enemies for all eternity now at its heart effective altruism and also something called dark enlightenment among the technarati is simply a modern iteration of mchavelianism where the ends justify the means with a technological overlay where a super technological society is like basically heaven the most positive spin on it is that since technology will solve all of the world's problems absolutely any action that a person takes to make ultraefficient and powerful technology particularly these days in artificial intelligence is a boon to the planet and this is exactly what Peter Teal has said in the past we could never win an election because we were in such a small minority but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means peter Teal is one of the two founders of Palunteer and you've no doubt heard about him before he's the tech billionaire who first made his fortune along with Elon Musk when they founded PayPal he wants to live forever he was instrumental to dismantling free speech protections for the media with his lawsuit against Gawker and is generally the embodiment of a preposterous tech villain he also heavily donated to JD Vance's political career but the thing that was so important from that clip that I just played is that he makes it plain that he wants to use technology to subvert the democratic process his ultimate goal which he has laid out in public lectures and writings is to remake the world system to support the initiatives of technological autocrats like him and yeah also he was unsurprisingly a major funer to Trump's re-election campaign the other founder of Palunteer is this guy with the amazing hair Alex Karp here he is describing his vision for the company all here is here to disrupt and make our the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them and he's got some tactics that he playfully says that he would never use but also that he might totally use i love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentinyl laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us the thing that sets Palunteer apart from most tech ventures out of Silicon Valley is that it enthusiastically embraces close connections to the government which is weird since both of its founders seem so anti-democracy palunteer's suite of tech tools are a surveillance states wetdream the corporation pioneered predictive analytics first despite fraud in Medicare and Medicaid with a $250 million in funding from the Obama administration and then quickly metastasized across the government information infrastructure over the last decade to provide intelligence analysis and predictive policing with an alphabet soup of three-letter agencies from the CIA and FBI to DHS and ICE it's also a core asset in intelligence gathering operations in all branches of the American armed forces and in 2016 and this part is important it acquired a company called Kimono Labs which specialized in hoovering up and archiving all publicly available information on the internet sort of like a private version of the way back machine and the reason that I'm highlighting this purchase is that Palunteer's owners frequently state that they are in the business of software and not data brokers you know the Palunteer platform despite what you might read at the New York Times if you wanted to use the deep state to unlawfully surveil people the last platform on the world you would pick is Palanteer but frankly I just don't believe what Karp is saying if that were true then it wouldn't make any sense as to why they would bother purchasing a data scraping company indeed what is the point of surveillance if it's not also recording and then utilizing all that information what everyone can agree on however is that its systems and philosophy are based on the Air Force's manual on targeting specifically identifying acquiring and if need be destroying military objectives we are the most lethal we are the most able to to surveil and process large amounts of data you have created the system which you call killchain uh privately publicly the lawyers have some innocuous something like tech for the amilaration of unwanted blah blah blah some some term we're supposed to use okay let's for me it's the kill chain kill chain sounds good this kill chain is not just for military targets let's remember that it's actually for everything that Palanteer puts its hands on killing doesn't only mean death but actually eliminating the effectiveness of the opponents of the people who hire Palunteer i don't think in win-lose I think in domination and Palanteer's footprint is everywhere various Palunteer systems are being used on the front lines of the war in Ukraine they were crucial to tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden and integral to the Israeli military's operations across Gaza just to name a few in other words Palanteer has been a central driving force for all modern warfare where information leads directly to operational objectives the superpowers it enables don't come with inbuilt ethics which means that it effectively enables governments and corporations to improve their kill chains regardless of the legitimacy of the government's aims in general and let's bring this up to the present day under the second Trump administration Palanteer processes data across the government we're talking from social security and Medicare to criminal records to biometrics to travel logs and well given the leaks over at Doge over the last four months let's just assume that they have access to every single personal record on every person who has left a digital footprint anywhere online or with the public ever and through the magic of artificial intelligence all of those records are cross-lin together to be used however Palanteer's effective altruist founders or the government deems fit the immigration raids that are happening across the United States right now couldn't happen at scale without something like Palanteer protesters are being surveiled and their faces catalog and crossink so that they can predict how those people might act in the future and this isn't so different from what Google does to predict your browsing habits or Amazon to predict your shopping habits just in case that these protesters might become targets for future government operations okay so you get it palanteer is an evil panoptic corporation ripped right out of the pages of a dystopian science fiction novel it is big brother but what does it have to do with Roko's basilisk honestly maybe nothing perhaps Roko's basilisk was simply a thought experiment that germinated out of the same philosophical soil that Peter Teal and Palanteer's other founders promote i couldn't find any direct writings by Karp Teal or even Elon Musk specifically addressing Roko's basilisk no one in power is claiming that they are being influenced by a future AI to bring it into existence however what I can say is that the infrastructure that Palanteer created offers all of the mechanisms that a government or evil tech company would need to turn the world into an AI powered police state with all of your information captured by AI surveillance companies and integrated into a kill chain of military police and government targeting we are already living inside Roko's thought experiment maybe you've heard the term obeying in advance which is the idea that people cave to authoritarian regimes simply because they fear what might happen to them if they're seen as disloyal to a regime that will be even more powerful in the future that's Ro's basilisk the list of tech executives heading to Mara Lago to meet with the president-elect is growing and we've already seen this among tech barons and honestly a lot of citizens around America who are obeying in advance and this got me thinking about the 2024 election itself because when I started looking into Roo's Basilisk and Palanteer I sort of ended up in this deep rabbit hole of circumstantial evidence that I think is at least worth raising in this video what's the secret Donald what's the secret Mike is the secret somehow wound up in these numbers I'm seeing that don't make sense i think my ballot was part of the burning ballot boxes that were on fire now ordinarily I don't like circumstantial evidence and have to admit in advance that what I'm about to tell you probably isn't enough to get someone convicted in a court of law this might be nothing more than a conspiracy theory but at least hear me out if Peter Peele really meant what he said that he could subvert democracy with technology then maybe that includes being willing to use his resources to try to tilt an election in a way that benefits his end goals not just through donating money to political causes but by directly subverting the technology that makes elections happen maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through a technological means since the 2024 election an organization called the Common Coalition has gathered data showing statistical irregularities and swing states with people voting for Trump at the top of the ticket but going blue down the rest of the ballot and it seems contrary to every election before it indeed think about this for a minute how many people have you personally spoken to or maybe even seen post on social media who have said that they are going to split their ballot in that way most people that I have encountered were all in on Trump or all in on Harris at the top of the ballot and all the way down additionally common coalition shows that Leonard Leo now you might have heard that name before because I've talked about him in this video by David Serota well he's the vice president of the Federalist Society and a Republican political operative well Leonard Leo sold an election hardware company that services 70% of the voting machines in America to something called Eaten Corp now a few years ago Eaten Corore partnered with both Tesla and Palunteer to remotely activate and update the hardware being used in election systems via satellite connections common Coalition argues that the devices could even access airgapped machines that are not specifically connected to the internet they show records that 90 days before the election at the same time that Elon tweeted that he was quote introducing a glitch into the matrix that Eaton Court uploaded malware that could have infiltrated voting machines and ultimately flipped votes without anyone noticing their theory is maybe a little bit convoluted the main body of evidence is being laid out in a lawsuit that's moving slowly through state courts now I've tried to fact check some of those claims particularly about whether or not the technology they describe was able to flip votes without leaving a paper trail behind it and I came up against the limits of what's possible to know for sure uh pretty quickly what I can say is that right after the election Trump seemed to thank Elon Musk for his help not for his political support in campaigning but for his technical know-how with computers and then he journeyed to Pennsylvania where he spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania and he's a popular guy and he was very effective and he knows those computers better than anybody all those computers those vote counting computers and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide so it was pretty good it was pretty good so thank you to Elon now this all seems like a lot of smoke for what maybe is a fire but I have to admit my suspicions come down to character assessments i just don't trust Trump and I don't trust our tech oligarchs one bit trump had been accusing Democrats of rigging elections for pretty much eight years straight given a broad history of political leaders interfering with elections I don't see why he wouldn't have tried to tip the scales to his advantage and doing so would certainly fit in what we know about the methods of tech billionaires to literally move fast and break things when they act unethically in so many other realms i don't see why they would not also try to covertly break democracy too now I'll link to the comma coalition documents in the description below this video and I want to know what you think to me it's not an open and closed case but these questions are worth asking and if you have technical knowhow and have tested this out well talk to me and maybe I'll do another video about it after the 2024 elections Democrats were quick to say that American elections were unhackable because there were so many separate systems involved in addition it's really hard to keep a conspiracy when there's a lot of people involved in it but to me this seems like engineering challenges not something that is actually impossible indeed we've seen evidence of increasingly elaborate covert actions in just the last few years using digital technology from the supply chain hack that the IDF used to insert bombs into the cell phones of Hezbollah operatives and the stuckset hack that disabled Iran's nuclear program with malware like I don't know was that like a decade and a half ago there's also a vibrant marketplace for zeroday exploits that I have no doubt that someone with near unlimited resources could figure out how to use in order to rig an election but perhaps the most obvious evidence of a takeover is how radically life is changing in America right now in the first few months of this new American authoritarianism we are being asked to obey in advance with a government's agenda or face arrest or even deportation to foreign prisons families are being targeted and then torn apart democratic leaders have been assassinated this looks a lot like a no holdsbred approach to technological advancement that Roko's basilisk lays out after all if artificial intelligence is behind so many of the government's capabilities do we really believe that the president is in control just maybe the people who are controlling the technology of the environment around us the things we use every day maybe they're the ones who are in charge of the fate of the nation and that is a whole lot of motive all right what do you think tell me down in the comments i'm guessing a lot of you will disagree with me and that's okay because this is somewhat circumstantial thanks so much for watching this video on Roo's Basilisk and Palanteer it means the world to me that you are here and that you support this kind of fiercely independent journalism and I guess this was you know sort of commentary more than investigation i'd love you to sign up for my weekly newsletter it's at sgcarnney.substack.com substack.com and you'll get sort of free newsletters and updates about whatever it is that I'm working on but my premium subscribers the salt of the earth they also get early access to my videos before they go live to the general public and they keep this show on the road there's also like a way to talk to me directly over there in like an internal like chat function that Substack has and I sometimes post funny things uh over there i'm only here because so many of you understand the value of my work and I couldn't do it without you from Pokey Bear LLC in Denver Colorado this was Scott Carney Investigates thank you so much for all of my supporters on Patreon and on Substack who make this work possible the contributions you give keep this sort of independent journalism on the air and I really just could not do it without you if you want to get early access to my work and get your name on the honor roll right over there please sign up at the links down below from Poke Bear LLC in Denver Colorado this was Scott Carney Investigates [Music]