Alan MacLeod : The AI Security State, When Big Tech Merges With Government Power

Well, one of the things some of our guests have mentioned, I'm thinking of Alexander Makouras, I'm thinking of Jacques Boe, I'm thinking of people who say, you know, politicians today are not responsive to voters.

In fact, they're the opposite of responsive to voters.

And so they're figuring out how they can accomplish what they want to accomplish without being responsive at all to voters.

And whether it's using technology or or psychological operations of various kinds.

I mean, a couple years ago it was calling everything they didn't like disinformation.

Now it's this sort of pre-crime, this idea of pre-crime.

And it's interesting because it all goes back, well, the original pre-crime that I'm familiar with was Paul Heydrich, who was a senior Nazi official, developed the idea of pre-crime in that regime.

But it started right after 2001, right, where there was a program called Total Information Awareness, which I'm sure you're aware of, where the FBI after 9-11 said, you know, if we could figure out who is the neighbor of the terrorist and how many phone calls a terrorist made to people and make a net of those people and then we could put it on a matrix and figure out who's close to that person and then we could go after them, right? And that idea, that company of total information awareness, you can tell me if I'm wrong, I think that became Palantir.

And so what Palantir does is a lot of that kind of surveillance technology, but it's all in service of not being responsive to what voters want.

Is that fair?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

Listen, when you actually poll voters, only 5% of them express a great deal of trust in AI.

And in fact, 77% of Americans say that AI could pose a fundamental threat to humanity.

So this is clearly not something that Americans are jumping into bed with.

We're clearly very skeptical.

about all of this.

And I'm reminded of that Princeton study from a while ago, which found that the United States does not operate as a democracy.

What the majority of Americans who are at the bottom of the economic what they want, often the opposite happens.

But if you're at the top 0.1% of Americans, your needs are most peculiarly met, just like how Adam Smith talked about in The Wealth of Nations back in the 1870s.

And, you know, as you said, Palantir really grew out of this Bush era surveillance state, the growth of it after 9-11 and the Patriot Act and everything.

everything like that.

And Palantir really sold their products as a way of, you know, really trying to identify terrorists or identify troublemakers.

But, you know, honestly, this goes back to the very founding of the internet with the DARPA net in the 1970s.

If you go back and have a look at, you know, it's not a very old book now, but it feels like a classic, the Surveillance Valley, the secret history of the internet by Yasha Levine.

He talks about how You know, the internet was really born in the 1970s out of the Vietnam War and the reaction to the Vietnam War by the FBI and other three-letter agencies.