Palantir + your NHS data = mass surveillance

https://www.opendemocracy.net/weekly-email-060626/

Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”

The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”

Palantir is turning the NHS into a tool for mass surveillance

https://www.opendemocracy.net/palantir-is-turning-the-nhs-into-a-tool-for-mass-surveillance/

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

Also from real life; my parents are now worried about AI and jobs.

My dad, trained as an engineer and supposedly someone who cared deeply about precision for most of his life, kept warning my sister about AI fakes and phishing just over a year ago. Now he trusts Google AI summaries completely. At least he’s semi-retired, though that comes with its own challenges. But my mother has “AI KPIs” at her pharma company.

These are curious people who read a lot but the only AI news that reaches them is sites reporting on CEO announcements and company press releases.

The Reuters/Oxford research from 2024 was pretty clear in my mind but seemingly no one knows about it: uncritical coverage feeds the hype.

Hollowed-out newsrooms replaced by “media workers” produce articles convenient for the businesses funding the ecosystem. There’s hardly much opinion, let alone critical. And frankly, the results are so addictive and seductive I think they’d just ignore them or explain away their usage.

They never hear that some companies quietly rehire up to 25% of the people they cut.

They never hear about research from people like Daron Acemoglu (2024 Nobel laureate in Economics) who found companies are deploying “excessive automation”: killing jobs without meaningfully lowering costs.

They read about herd behavior passing for innovation and don’t have any friends or contacts outside of us, really, to tell them otherwise.

I don’t know what to do with all this either but that’s what it looks like in my family.

How are your family members dealing with AI?