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Personally, I wouldn't trust the tech billionaires farther than I can throw them.
The people funding the datacenters love to argue that AI is a world-ending technology that might well kill us all, but we still need to do this, because if we don't then surely someone else will. Then the next day they will proudly brag about how good AI is at taking people's jobs, completely ignoring that this is ruining the lives of thousands. If their predictions are correct it will ruin the lives of hundreds of millions more.
We know that existing big tech companies will do anything to get a monopoly and line their own pockets as much as possible. At this point, the playbook of selling a good product at a loss until you have captured the market, then enshittifying to capture as much profit as possible with little regard for your customers is well known. The AI companies claim to have the best interests of humanity at heart, but have done nothing to actually show they are different.
The tech bros have managed to appear completely disconnected from the rest of humanity. People joke about how Altman and Zuckerberg are actually aliens wearing human skinsuits. Palantir is named after the evil orb in Lord of the Rings, and develops top of the line surveillance tech with little regard for how it may be used. Elon, the most human of the bunch, has claimed we are summoning a demon that we don't fully understand, yet makes no attempt at halting the process, instead choosing to join the race himself.
Then for anyone not American, there is the problem with these companies having ties to the Trump administration. An administration which seems to view every relationship as entirely transactional and that will use its leverage aggressively to get whatever it wants out of others. It is no wonder then, that the rest of the world is hesitant when it comes to dependence on American AI.
Well yeah, America is becoming an Empire. What did you think an Empire was?
And this applies domestically as well; woke is in retreat in large part because US state ideology is just generally in retreat. The imperial state cares about what it can get(and votes might be part of that deal), not about what the people believe.
A non-Trump empire would do the same thing.
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Tolkien is pretty clear that the Palantir are not evil, were not created by evil, but merely perilous because evil had one of them.
I don’t care what that old English prick says, DO NOT PONDER THE ORB.
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That is some deep lore then. I mostly remember the movies, and in those the Palantir is used by Sauron to communicate with Saruman, and it seems like once someone looks inside it, Sauron can completely dominate their will/read their mind. That is what it looked like, and why I assumed Gandalf was so intent on getting the orb out of the Took's hands.
Given that, I think my association of "evil surveillance orb" fits quite well.
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Your username is Bombadil and you mostly only remember the movies?
Bombadil is super interesting. He is colorful, whimsical, dangerous, and somewhat beyond human understanding. The section where they move through his forest is a high point of the first book. It also stood out to me in part because the movies completely omit it. Worldbuilding about things irrelevant to the current plot is much less exciting by comparison, and the "fool of a Took" scene is very easy to remember.
It might be technically more correct to say I remember the broad strokes and certain scenes and characters. And that the books and movies tend to blend together in my mind.
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Quite. Naming your system after a fantasy tool that was once used for good and has been corrupted by evil and thus dangerous to use with skeptical returns should have everyone giving you a side-eye and going 'Bruh'.
People can be very superficial. I have to keep talking a friend out of making his technology startup Panopticon. Somehow I cannot get it through his head that yes it’s cool but you really really don’t want to name your project after a dystopian prison because I am not the only person who knows what that word means.
Even if you aren't familiar with the history of the term, "Panopticon" sounds like the name of an evil transformer.
Said friend is 40 years too old for that reference. To him it just sounds like cool Victoriana, like calling a time travel device the Chronotron.
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He ended up calling it "Flock", right?
Exactly :P I guess Flock is an example that an innocuous names won’t protect you if the underlying system is disliked. Sooner or later your product becomes the most salient association with the word. The Open in OpenAI has long since become a meaningless collection of syllables.
Maybe it’s better to get ahead of the curve and call yourself Palantir so everyone knows where they stand and people can hate you in peace and not get worked up by the hypocrisy. Maybe names just really don’t matter at all after a certain size.
I don’t really get branding on a fundamental level. I’m just opposed to actively shooting yourself in the face.
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