And My App! Palantir’s Quest To Give AI a Moral Purpose

In a hole in the ground there lived some hobbits—not a nasty, dirty, wet hole. Silicon Valley isn’t known for those. But a respectable place in a respectable town—and yet, somehow, these hobbits ended up going out on a great adventure. They may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but they gained…well, you will see whether they gained anything in the end.

The founders of Palantir—a name from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—saw themselves as embarking on an adventure out of the comfort of the Silicon Shire and into the real world. While their peer companies remain ensconced in the valley, tending to the decadent tasks of building yet another social media or food delivery application, the founders of Palantir decided to engage in skirmishes against the orcs and balrogs threatening domestic and national security.

In their recent book about their idea, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the CEO of Palantir, Alexander C. Karp, and its head of corporate affairs, Nicholas W. Zamiska, make the case that Silicon Valley has turned its back on the American people by poaching talented engineers who might have done nationally important work, and refusing to collaborate with the government on meaningful ventures. More important—and surprisingly, coming from the tech-world—they urge for a revival of the Western canon of literature, culture, and religion to reunite the country and rediscover a shared purpose.

Within the strangely powder-blue book of around 200 pages (with another hundred of notes and sources), the authors argue that advancements in artificial intelligence—in particular, the advancements made by foreign adversaries—demands closer collaboration between the technology industry and the government. Many of America’s brilliant minds in the technology sector are squandering their talents in the absence of a national project, the authors say—and convincingly so. They champion artificial intelligence and its application to security and defense as the next all-in national project.

This is not a crazy idea. On February 28, just 10 days after the release of Karp and Zamiska’s book, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright—in a room of scientists, engineers, and laboratory directors—called for a new Manhattan Project: a global AI race.

We probably ought to feel unease on hearing the development and weaponization of AI compared to an arms race. Not only do Terminator-like scenarios come to mind but so does immense skepticism and concern over yet another collaboration between technology companies and the government.

Perhaps some comfort can be found, however, in the choice of the company’s name. A palantír, from Tolkien’s fantasy novel, is an indestructible stone capable of long-distance telepathic communication. As a source of immense power, it contains dangers if used imprudently. So too, we hope, the founders of Palantir can safeguard against the corrupting potential of AI.

To support their central argument, the authors divide The Technological Republic into four parts. They first argue that Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly uninterested in working on national projects, such as food, shelter, water, education, medicine, and local law enforcement. What they favor are get-rich-quick consumer-driven pursuits. Such lack of interest in applying capital and code to solving honorable problems can largely be attributed to the distance from precarious living that has been made possible by the successes of previous generations.

The second part of their account, titled "The Hollowing Out of the American Mind," attempts to locate this decline in the broader failure of American education. And they connect this failure to what they call "technological agnosticism." Since the attack on—and subsequent retreat of—mandatory Western civilization courses after the 1960s, American history has become more foreign to American students. Coupled with decreasing church attendance and religious affiliation—particularly among the adept at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the answer to the question, "What should we build?" becomes "Whatever we can." Without a deeper shared identity and belief, they build that which is expedient or profitable without concern for human flourishing or the prosperity of the nation.

The Technological Republic then turns toward how Palantir hopes to correct the problems they see in the technology sector. It’s a little overdone. Karp and Zamiska give some credit to other companies that have ventured out of the Silicon Shire: the missile-defense company Anduril, for example (another firm named in reference to The Lord of the Rings: Andúril, Flame of the West, the elvish name for Aragorn’s sword). Palantir has done such worthy things as partnering with the World Food Program to optimize a food distribution chain allowing two million people to be fed in a year. But the book could have been improved by speaking more about the other companies breaking the norm of Silicon Valley.

Karp and Zamiska end their book with a call to "rebuild the technological republic." And it is this counterpoint to the dominant culture that makes the book so refreshing. All too often, technologists have tuned their reason to understand the how without the why. Skepticism about everything except cold reason created the generation of Silicon Valley founders who, the authors scoff, have "cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose" while actually having no higher aims.

The book calls instead for a generation of engineers "who are engaged with and curious about the world, the movement of history and its contradictions, not merely skilled at programming." Karp and Zamiska, moreover, urge the return of community, commitment to the nation, and faith. If a technological West were rebuilt without a renewed morality and a central historical purpose, then engaging in an industry-government AI arms race—as we are poised to do—may be rushing us to a genuinely dystopian future.

The West is in danger. The threat comes not just from the contemporary equivalent of orcs and balrogs, but from a lurking evil and decline of the good that many ignore—just as they did in The Lord of the Rings. What Karp and Zamiska want may not come to be, but The Technological Republic offers not only a convincing account of the failings of Silicon Valley but a way to reverse the decline, starting by rekindling the Western canon.

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
Crown Currency, 320 pp., $30

Matthew Phillips is a research and development engineer in New Mexico.

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