[Y-bar]

Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?

[hydrogen7800]

>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?

Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.

[Y-bar]

I consciously used the word ”produce” rather than ”develop” or ”invent” to try to be clear that I meant ”[produce] from a factory”.

[hydrogen7800]

Fair enough. In that case I agree.

[phoehne]

My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.

In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.

But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.

A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.

[duskdozer]

No, but it's also the engineer at Palantir who is enabling it with their efforts. If every engineer there immediately resigned and no other agreed to work there, the situation would end. One can try to hide behind the idea that they are only 1/n_employees responsible (typical corollary: therefore not responsible at all), but this doesn't change the fact that they are participants in what is happening.

[Y-bar]

I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.

A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.

A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.

A fence contains the intent of separating things.

A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.

The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.

(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)

[phoehne]

I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.

[immibis]

Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.

[k_g_b_]

Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene. On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it. In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.

[wahnfrieden]

IBM designed and serviced such a system when it was known to be used by a genocidal government as the customer

[TitaRusell]

Meh American oil companies were literally selling the oil that German tanks ran on until Roosevelt finally got them to stop.

And I am not going to single out the Americans here lots of people in my country made money on the Atlantik wall.

[wahnfrieden]

IBM wasn't only providing commodity infrastructure. They designed schema for labeling Jews and other categories of people for targeted internment and extermination