Last year, the powerful US data company Palantir filed documents for an initial public offering. Included was a remarkable letter to investors from Alex Karp, the CEO, that is worth remembering now.
“Our society has effectively outsourced the building of software that makes our world possible to a small group of engineers in an isolated corner of the country,” he wrote. “The question is whether we also want to outsource the adjudication of some of the most consequential moral and philosophical questions of our time.”
Karp added, “The engineering elite in Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires.” To put it more bluntly, techies might be brilliant and clever at what they do, but that doesn’t make them qualified to organise our lives. It was a striking statement from someone who is himself an ultra techie and whose company’s extensive military and intelligence links have sparked controversy.