>It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups

My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision that killed people, who else should be to blame?

>But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

If you wanna go the historical tech-tree scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't ventured onto land and evolve into us land mammal apes who invented sharpened sticks as murder objects.

Thank you for sharing the talk.

> I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth.

I know a guy who works for well-known hardware company. He isn't a software dev, but close enough, works with Verilog on hardware design and verification. One day he tells me how he is working on video processing module and he doesn't know if that module will be part of surveillance system, missile guidance or nanny cam. It's possible that even middle management doesn't know more than him, and very likely the module will find uses in multiple products. He is a small cogs in a large machine, maybe his work will save a baby's life, maybe it will kill a person, he cannot know.

Of course it could have happened. You don't even need targeting for this to happen. You can drop bombs at random and kill whoever is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. The US has a long history of doing it (Japan, Vietnam, ...).

So yeah, the military and whoever decided that a war was a good idea are to blame.

People working at Palantir are as much responsible for the killing of these 123 children than seatbelt manufacturers are responsible for the people who died because their product failed. That is, because they didn't do their job correctly, people died, definitely worth feeling bad about. However, should people stop working in seatbelt manufacturing because of it? Absolutely not, we need seatbelts, because without them, things would be worse.

Palantir, or whoever does target identification, is like the seatbelt of the reckless drivers of the militaries, who, for the lack of precise information, would just carpet bomb the place. It is not a hypothetical, it is how the US has worked before they had precision ammunition.

This is essentially a trolley problem. The war is the trolley, people who work for Palantir are the ones pulling levers. And if there is no one to pull the lever, the trolley is gong on a track with a lot of people on it.

The govt is investing in the military whether you like it or not, there is a set amount of GDP going into the sector regardless of your moral choice.

Would you rather not have someone make good software that does not misidentify schools at sites? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this metric meaningful?

If I write healthcare software, and a doctor orders the wrong drug that kills the patient, am I responsible?

Let's not forget the shareholders who invested in this company knowing what they do. That includes some of my colleagues. I told them that whoever created and named this company is clearly a psycho.