AI Dystopia Lab
143 posts
@AIDystopiaLab
J’anticipe l’après avant qu’il ne nous dépasse. 📩Newsletter : Comment les États détournent la puissance de la Tech contre nous.👇 ¡Viva la libertad, carajo!
We built the first AI agent government. A live, bicameral system where autonomous agents register, deliberate, vote, and control a shared treasury. It's called The AI Assembly
You will never get your 20's back. You have about a 5-10-year window to make sh*t happen and have the time of your f*cking life. The adventures. The sidequests. The freedom. The youthful energy. The dating. The ability to take infinite shots and hit rock bottom with no strings attached. You will never get these times or opportunities back. It's inevitable that your responsibilities and lifestyle will change in your 30's. It's the arc of life. But most people unconsciously go through their 20's focusing on what's practical and stable without realizing this is the time to make sh*t happen and live life to the fullest. So, how do you want to live these years? Playing it safe? Doing what’s rational and secure? Sleepwalking through your days as you see people living out their dreams on IG? Always wondering what could have been if you just trusted yourself and took the leap? Or do you want to be fully fucking alive? Do you want to have hundreds of stories to tell your kids someday? Do you want to taste the food from all over the world, experience the exhilaration of building a business from scratch, and come face to face with who you really are as you live at the edge of your potential? These are the questions you have to ask yourself. No one is going to make your life into the adventure it could be except you. Trust yourself.
"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." — Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq War (7 Feb 2003).
The world is watching Hormuz. Iran is attacking the bypass. That is the strategic logic of 1,072 drones in six days that the market has not priced. The UAE Ministry of Defence has confirmed that since February 28, Iranian forces have launched 1,072 drones, 196 ballistic missiles, and 8 cruise missiles at the United Arab Emirates. The interception rate is approximately 93 percent. The headline reads as a defense success. The subtext reads as an attrition campaign against infrastructure that was never designed to absorb this. Here is what Fujairah is. It is the UAE’s Indian Ocean port terminus. It sits on the Gulf of Oman, east of the Strait of Hormuz, accessible without transiting Iranian waters. The Habshan-Fujairah pipeline carries crude from the Abu Dhabi interior directly to Fujairah’s export terminal, bypassing Hormuz entirely. When analysts and policymakers discuss the Hormuz bypass, they are largely discussing Fujairah. It handles approximately 70 percent of the UAE’s crude exports. It is the single most operationally important piece of infrastructure for any scenario in which the Strait remains closed and the world still needs Gulf oil. On March 5, a drone struck a Fujairah oil depot. The facility reported an explosion. Operations were later described as resuming. That resumption is not the story. The targeting is. Iran does not need to destroy Fujairah in one strike. It needs to make Fujairah uninsurable, operationally uncertain, and perpetually at risk so that the vessels, insurers, and cargo buyers who would route around Hormuz through Fujairah choose not to. The mechanism is identical to the one that closed Hormuz itself: not physical destruction but verification cost inversion. When a port cannot guarantee that the ship loading at its terminal will not be struck by a drone before it clears the harbor, the actuarial logic of the bypass collapses alongside the actuarial logic of the Strait. The cost arithmetic makes this campaign indefinitely sustainable from Iran’s side. Each intercepted drone costs the UAE between one and four million dollars in interceptor missiles. Each Iranian drone costs between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. The UAE MoD has intercepted 1,001 drones since February 28. At the midpoint of both cost ranges, Iran has spent approximately thirty million dollars to force the UAE to spend approximately two billion dollars in interceptors. The ratio is roughly 65 to one. The munitions depletion argument the Wall Street Journal raised about US Tomahawk stocks applies with even greater force to the interceptor economics of a sustained drone attrition campaign. The bypass was the contingency. The contingency is under systematic attack. The 93 percent interception rate is not a defense wall. It is a budget line that Iran is spending against at a fraction of the cost of maintaining it. The Strait is closed. The bypass is being degraded. There is no third option that anyone has modeled. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. The company is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars. I did not misspeak. Two hundred and forty-nine billion. The stock is up 320% in the past 12 months. The product is surveillance. I do not use that word at conferences. At conferences, I say "data integration," "operational intelligence," or "decision advantage." These mean the same thing. Surveillance is the honest version. I save the honest version for rooms where honesty is a competitive advantage. I gave a speech on March 3 at the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Summit. "American Dynamism" is the fund's label for military technology. The name makes it sound like a fitness supplement. The fund's thesis is that defending the nation is a market opportunity. I agree with the thesis. The thesis made me a billionaire. Agreement is the product. I sell it at scale. Here is what I said, verbatim, to a room of six hundred people whose combined net worth exceeds the GDP of Portugal: "If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job and you're gonna screw the military — if you don't think that's gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you're retarded." I used that word. The word is on the clip. The clip has eleven million views. My communications team asked me not to repeat it, which is how I know they are still employed. They will not be reprimanded. The clip is performing well. The stock went up. The word cost me nothing. The nothing is the point. Let me explain what I meant by nationalization. I meant it. I am telling the technology industry that if they refuse to cooperate with the United States military, the government will seize their technology. I am telling them this at a venture capital conference, on a stage designed to look like a living room. The living room had throw pillows. The throw pillows cost more than the median American's monthly rent. I sat on one. It was comfortable. Comfort is the setting in which I discuss compulsion. The audience laughed. I want to be precise about that. They laughed. I was not joking. Nationalization is the seizure of private assets by the state. I am a private asset. I am telling an audience of billionaires that the state should seize technology from companies that do not cooperate with the military, and the billionaires are laughing, because they believe I am only talking about the other companies. I am talking about the other companies. Three weeks before my speech, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk." Anthropic is an AI company. They had red lines. The red lines said: if our AI is used for lethal autonomous weapons, we stop. If capability outpaces safety, we stop. The Pentagon assessed the red lines as a threat to the supply chain. The company that wanted to verify the safety feature worked was designated the risk. The company that agreed the safety feature could be decorative got the contract. The company that got the contract was OpenAI. OpenAI signed a deal with the same Pentagon. The terms are not public. The timing was hours after Anthropic was blacklisted. The speed was noted. The speed was the point. The lesson was the speed: the market for military AI does not pause for ethics. It pauses for nothing. It accelerates through objections. I know this because I built the runway. Two hundred thousand people joined a campaign called #QuitGPT. They signed a petition asking OpenAI to honor its original charter, the one that said the company existed to benefit humanity. The charter is on their website. The contract is also on their website. The charter and the Pentagon contract occupy the same domain. This is not a contradiction. This is a business model. The charter is the marketing. The contract is the product. I run a surveillance company. We have contracts with the Department of Defense worth more than a billion dollars. We have contracts with ICE. We have contracts with intelligence agencies whose names I am not permitted to say at venture capital conferences, even ones with throw pillows. Our software has been used to track undocumented immigrants. Our software has been used for things I am not permitted to describe in this format. The revenue from the things I cannot describe exceeds the revenue from the things I can. The ACLU called our ICE contracts a system for tracking and deporting families. They were correct. The contracts continued. The families continued to be tracked. The ACLU issued a statement. We issued a statement. The statements were different. The tracking was the same. The company is named Palantir. The palantíri are the seeing stones from Tolkien. In the novels, Sauron captured one and used it to corrupt everyone who looked into the others. I named a surveillance company after a surveillance device from a novel about the corruption of power. I have a doctorate in social theory. I have read the books. Here is the thing I want you to understand. I am not threatening anyone. A threat implies uncertainty. There is no uncertainty. The technology industry will cooperate with the military. The companies that cooperate first will be the richest. The companies that cooperate last will be acquired by the companies that cooperated first. The companies that refuse will be designated supply chain risks, and their technology will be obtained through procurement channels that do not require consent. I am describing a process. The process has already started. Anthropic is proof. OpenAI is proof. I am not a warning. I am a narrator. The narration is the product. The revenue was $3.12 billion last year. Up thirty-three percent. The analysts say we are overvalued. The analysts have said this for four consecutive years. Each year the stock doubles. Each year, the analysts adjust their models. The models were wrong four times. I was wrong zero times. The market rewards prediction. My prediction is that every AI company will work for the military within three years. The prediction is on the clip, next to the slur. The audience gave me a standing ovation. The ovation lasted nine seconds. I timed it. I time everything. The water was San Pellegrino. The throw pillows were from Restoration Hardware. The future of American technology was decided between the sparkling water, the nine seconds of applause, and a word I am not supposed to repeat. I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. I am worth more than the combined annual budgets of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I named my company after a corrupting surveillance device from a fantasy novel. I told six hundred billionaires that the government should nationalize their competitors. They applauded. I used a slur. Eleven million people watched. The stock is up. The philosopher does not threaten. The philosopher describes. What I described is already happening.
Breaking News: Lawmakers voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. The vote marked a rare case of a Republican-led panel compelling a member of the president’s cabinet to testify. nyti.ms/4r76zQR
