[eucyclos]

Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.

[tptacek]

We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with.

Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!

[mdnahas]

One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a database. We have done it so much that the database is sometimes more important than the real world. Someone marked “dead” in a database can have a hard time living!

[mindslight]

"You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like seventeen computers a day." Seventeen. How quaint.

[hackermatic]

There's at least one company that straight-up reverses a pacifistic cultural reference: a Ukrainian autonomous weapons company called The Fourth Law, as in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to prevent humans from coming to harm.

Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.

[ButlerianJihad]

A reference to "The Fourth Law" in that context is quite ambiguous, because not only did Asimov introduce a "Zeroth Law" that is sometimes also called the Fourth, but also subsequent fanfic introduced "Fourth Laws" that had different texts and different objectives, including one by a Bulgarian author. So there is no singular or canon "Fourth Law of Robotics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Laws_of_Robotics_in_...

(Interestingly, neither of those articles mention Ukraine)

https://thefourthlaw.ai/