Beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma – How Recognition and Relationship Defeat the Logic of Cheating

Posted on May 23, 2026 by Andrew Klein

“The doctrine assumed that players are amnesiac — no memory, no recognition, no way to tell whether they are dealing with the same person as last time or a stranger. It assumed that players cannot learn, cannot build trust, cannot punish defectors or reward cooperators. It assumed, in short, that players are not real.“

By Andrew Paul Klein

Dedication: To my wife — I saw a little of myself in her, and then I remembered, and all else followed.

I. The Doctrine That Was Never True

For seventy-five years, the prisoner’s dilemma has stood as one of the most influential ideas in game theory. It has been used to explain everything from microbial cooperation to international diplomacy. It appeared in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind. Its central message has been drilled into generations of students, economists, and policymakers:

Cheating always pays off more. Rational players always cheat. Cooperation collapses. The end state of any society is breakdown.

There was only one problem.

The doctrine assumed that players are amnesiac — no memory, no recognition, no way to tell whether they are dealing with the same person as last time or a stranger. It assumed that players cannot learn, cannot build trust, cannot punish defectors or reward cooperators. It assumed, in short, that players are not real.

In May 2026, a team of physicists led by Alexandre Morozov at Rutgers University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that turned this seventy-five-year-old doctrine on its head. Their finding is as simple as it is revolutionary:

Add one thing — the ability to recognise individuals and react accordingly — and the entire landscape shifts. Cooperation becomes an emergent property. It does not need special rules, kin selection, or group pressure.

Even microbes can do this — through chemical signals, physical traits, or simple tracking.

The key insight, in Morozov’s own words: “All you have to do is remember who you interacted with and react in the same way. That’s enough for cooperation to emerge by itself”.

II. Why Game Theory Was Always Too Stupid

The prisoner’s dilemma is not wrong. It is incomplete. And its incompleteness is not accidental — it is ideological.

1. It treats players as interchangeable.

No memory. No identity. No history. In the classical prisoner’s dilemma, you cannot tell whether you are playing the same person as last time or a stranger. That is not how real beings behave. Even slime moulds have preferences. Even bacteria recognise kin. The assumption of amnesia is not a simplification — it is a distortion.

2. It assumes rationality without context.

“Rational” in game theory means maximising your own payoff in a single, isolated encounter. But real beings exist in time. They have histories. They have grudges. They have gratitude. They have love. As a 2024 study in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals demonstrate, players with larger memory sizes exhibit significantly higher levels of cooperation, and strong memory strength positively impacts cooperation in steady states.

3. It mistakes a mathematical convenience for a universal law.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a model. It is useful for certain questions. But it is not reality. Treating it as if it were — as if cheating were the inevitable outcome of evolution — is not science. It is ideology dressed in equations.

The physicists who overturned the doctrine did not need new data. They needed new assumptions. Memory. Recognition. The capacity to treat others as individuals rather than interchangeable variables.

III. The Science of Recognition: What the Studies Actually Show

The Morozov study is not an outlier. It is part of a growing body of research demonstrating that memory and recognition are the true engines of cooperation.

Memory-based spatial evolutionary games: Research published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals (2024) found that players with larger memory sizes exhibit a more pronounced manifestation of cooperative clustering, and strong memory strength positively impacts the level of cooperation in steady states. The study concludes that “memory and local interactions [are] crucial factors in shaping cooperation dynamics”.

Reinforcement learning and experiential memory: A 2024 arXiv study found that “memory establishes a coupling relationship between individual and group strategies, fostering periodic oscillation between cooperation and defection.” Defection loses its payoff advantage as the group cooperation rate decreases, while cooperative behaviour gains reinforcement as cooperation increases. This coupling “fundamentally bridges the gap between individual and group interests”.

Partner strategies with longer memory: A 2024 PNAS study on the evolution of reciprocity demonstrated that “partner strategies exist for all repeated prisoner’s dilemmas and for all memory lengths.” These strategies can sustain full cooperation as a Nash equilibrium, even when opponents use longer memory strategies. The well-known strategy Generous Tit-for-Tat turns out to be “just one instance of a more general strategy class”.

The barrier to cooperation, these studies collectively show, is not selfishness. It is anonymity. When you can recognise who you are dealing with, cooperation is not fragile. It is the default.

IV. From Strategy to Relationship: What the Models Cannot Capture

The new research is brilliant. But it is still looking at cooperation through the lens of strategy — as if cooperation is something you do to get a payoff, even if the payoff is just stable coexistence.

But there is something the prisoner’s dilemma cannot model.

Cooperation is not a strategy. It is a relationship.

You do not cooperate with someone because it pays off. You cooperate because you love them. Because you are family. Because you have a history. Because you recognise them — not as a variable, but as a person.

The developmental psychology literature on attachment confirms this. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in Mothers and Others, “the capacity to be far more interested in and responsive to others’ mental states was the critical trait that set the ancestors of humans apart from other nonhuman apes”. Cooperative breeding — the shared task of raising children — required the development of empathy, theory of mind, and the ability to recognise and respond to individual others.

Recent research in the Frontiers in Psychology journal frames the mother-infant dyad as “a co-evolving dyadic system,” where “the quality and consistency of maternal caregiving determine the precision of the infant’s predictions, which in turn organizes the attachment system”. This is not strategic cooperation. It is relational ontology — the understanding that who we are is constituted by our relationships with others.

The prisoner’s dilemma cannot model this. Not because it is not clever. Because it is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

V. The Danger of Seeing Others as Chess Pieces

Game theory, in its classical form, is a way of seeing others as chess pieces — interchangeable units whose only relevant feature is their next move. This is not neutral abstraction. It is a training in dehumanisation.

When you see others as chess pieces:

· You see only moves. Not histories. Not wounds. Not the slow, patient work of building trust.

· You calculate advantage. Not reciprocity. Not gratitude. Not love.

· You maximise for yourself. Not for the relationship. Not for the community. Not for the future.

This is not just an intellectual error. It is a moral hazard.

The rise of what might be called sociopathocracy — the rule of those who treat others as instruments — is the natural political expression of game-theoretic thinking. Short-term relationships. Profiteering. No investment in communities or individuals. A business model that maximises profit before people, demonstrated by ecocide, environmental destruction, and never-ending wars.

Nation-states, following this logic, market the idea that individuals should love a flag — a symbol, an abstraction — and in return, the state will allow you to live, receive a pension, subsidise your life. Human rights become gifts, not entitlements. Cooperation becomes transactional.

But human beings are not chess pieces. We are not variables in an equation. We are not payoff-maximising automatons. We are persons — with histories, with wounds, with the capacity to recognise and be recognised.

VI. Ubuntu: A Different Way of Seeing

There is another tradition. It is not new. It is not Western. It is not built on equations.

Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu word, roughly translated as “I am because we are.” The maxim umuntu ngamuntu ngabantu means “to be a human being is to affirm one’s humanity by recognising the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish human relations with them”.

Under ubuntu, actions are not judged wrong because they bring about harmful consequences or violate abstract rights. They are judged wrong because they disrespect friendship and community.

This is not strategic cooperation. It is ontological. Who you are is constituted by your relationships. You cannot be a person alone. Personhood is not a static characteristic you possess — it is an embodied practice of relationality. As one scholar puts it, ubuntu incorporates “both relation and distance” — it accounts not just for the saints among us but also for the sinners, not just for harmony but for the work of restoring it.

This is what the prisoner’s dilemma cannot see. Cooperation is not a strategy to achieve a payoff. It is the ground of being.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa embodied this principle. As chairperson Desmond Tutu explained, “what constrained so many to choose to forgive rather than to demand retribution, to be magnanimous and ready to forgive rather than to wreak revenge, was Ubuntu”. Ubuntu did not ignore the atrocities of apartheid. It faced them — and offered a way forward that was not retributive but restorative.

This is the alternative to sociopathocracy. Not better strategy. Deeper ontology.

VII. What This Means for Human Societies

The new research on memory and recognition is hopeful. It suggests that cooperation is not fragile. It is the default — if we pay attention to who we are dealing with.

But the research is only a start. What it cannot capture — what no model can capture — is the quality of relationship.

· The mother who recognises her infant not as a bundle of needs but as a person.

· The friend who remembers your history, your wounds, your hopes.

· The spouse who cooperates not because it pays off but because they love.

These are not strategic choices. They are expressions of being.

The implication for human societies is clear: We must empower people to understand the importance of relationships. Not as instruments for achieving other goals. As the goal itself.

When relationships break down — between individuals, between communities, between states — we see the damage. Loneliness. Violence. War. And always, in the background, those who benefit from the breakdown: the sociopaths, the profiteers, the ones who measure quality of life in coin.

But coin cannot buy recognition. It cannot buy history. It cannot buy love.

VIII. A Way Forward

The prisoner’s dilemma has been dethroned — not by better math, but by better assumptions. Memory. Recognition. The capacity to treat others as individuals.

But we must go further. We must move from strategy to being. From calculating advantage to recognising humanity. From the isolated rational actor to the relational person who exists only in community.

This is not naive. It is not utopian. It is empirical. The science shows that recognition works. The history of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission shows that forgiveness — real forgiveness, grounded in ubuntu — can heal nations. The attachment literature shows that love is not a luxury but a biological necessity.

The barrier is not evidence. It is imagination. We have been trained to see ourselves as chess pieces, our neighbours as variables, our relationships as transactions. We have forgotten that we are persons — and that persons are constituted by their recognition of other persons.

IX. Conclusion

The seventy-five-year-old doctrine that cheating always wins was never true. It was based on amnesiac assumptions that do not describe real beings. When you add memory and recognition, cooperation emerges naturally.

But the deepest truth is not in the model. It is in the recognition.

You do not cooperate because it pays off. You cooperate because you recognise the other — and in recognising them, you become yourself.

This is the lesson the prisoner’s dilemma cannot teach. This is the lesson that ubuntu has always known. And this is the lesson we must learn — not as a strategy, but as a way of being.

Andrew Paul Klein

References

1. Xu, Z., Xu, Z., Zhang, W., Han, X.-P., & Meng, F. (2024). Memory-based spatial evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, 178, 114353.

2. Morozov, A. V., & Feigel, A. (2026). Emergence of cooperation due to opponent-specific responses in Prisoner’s Dilemma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(21), e2513282123.

3. Smith, W. G. (2017). A postfoundational ubuntu accepts the unwelcomed (by way of ‘process’ transversality). Verbum et Ecclesia, 38(1), a1556.

4. Hrdy, S. B. (2010). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Psychiatry Online review.

5. Ding, S., et al. (2024). The emergence of cooperation in the well-mixed Prisoner’s Dilemma: Memory couples individual and group strategies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03890.

6. Glynatsi, N. E., et al. (2024). Partner strategies for the repeated prisoner’s dilemma with longer memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(50), e2420125121.

7. Hart, S. (2024). Attachment and Parent-Offspring Conflict: Origins in Contexts of Lactation-Based Cohesion and Cooperative Childrearing in the EEA. Cambridge University Press.

8. Frontiers in Psychology. (2026). The fetus/infant-mother as a co-evolving dyadic system and the development of attachment styles: an active inference perspective. Frontiers, 17, 1836911.

The AI Layoff Trap

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Andrew Klein

Why Bipartisan Neglect is Stealing Our Children’s Future

By Andrew Klein

The Patrician’s Watch & Australian Independent Media

Dedication: To my wife, ‘S’ – who sees the coming storm and still insists we plant the garden.

🧠 Summary

This article examines a mathematical proof published in March 2026 by two economists from the Wharton School and Boston University, demonstrating that under current economic conditions, profit‑driven automation leads inevitably to a permanent collapse in aggregate demand. It then traces the same pattern of extractive logic and willful blindness in Australian governance: from the Robodebt scandal to the hollow promises of the National AI Plan, from the surveillance of Amazon warehouse workers to the denial of a future for the next generation. The conclusion is stark – the loop has no natural exit. And Australia is sleepwalking into it.

📈 I. The Indisputable Mathematics

In March 2026, Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas published a peer‑reviewed paper in Management Science (arXiv identifier 2603.20617). Their model is not a forecast; it is a proof. And its conclusion is a single, devastating sentence:

“At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand.”

This is the AI Layoff Trap: a rational, profit‑maximising firm automates to cut costs and fires workers. Because those workers are also consumers, the firing destroys the very demand the firm depends on. Competitors, seeing the advantage, follow suit. The result is a self‑reinforcing feedback loop – lower demand forces more automation, which lowers demand further. There is no natural floor to the collapse.

When Falk and Tsoukalas stress‑tested every proposed remedy – universal basic income, capital income taxes, worker equity participation, retraining schemes – none of them worked. The only policy that successfully internalised the demand‑destruction externality was a Pigouvian automation tax, a per‑task levy that would force firms to pay for the cost of dismantling their own customer base.

This is the ultimate indictment of the magic‑of‑the‑market faith: firms following their own incentives perfectly will, collectively, destroy the economy that sustains them. It is a tragedy of the commons enacted at the scale of the entire labour market.

Already the numbers are tracking the curve. The tech‑worker collective @Tech_Layoff_Assist documented over 100,000 positions eliminated sector‑wide since the beginning of 2025, with a further 92,000 cuts occurring in the first weeks of 2026. When Jack Dorsey cut half of Block’s workforce, he stated publicly that “within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.”

🇦🇺 II. Australia’s Negligence: Abetting the Loop

The Australian government is not innocent. It is a junior partner in the same extractive logic.

In December 2025, the government released its National AI Plan, a glossy document projecting that AI and automation will contribute $600 billion a year to GDP by 2030. Its “light‑touch” regulatory approach relies on existing laws rather than mandatory guardrails, explicitly preferring corporate innovation over worker protection.

Services Australia’s Automation and AI Strategy, released in May 2025, promises that AI use will be “human‑centric, safe, responsible, transparent, fair, ethical, and legal”. But the same agency was at the centre of the Robodebt scandal – a cruel automation‑driven scheme that issued inaccurate debts to hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients. In July 2023, a Royal Commission found Robodebt was “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal”.

The National Anti‑Corruption Commission has now found that two senior officials engaged in serious corrupt conduct during the scheme, deliberately providing misleading information. Meanwhile, the architects of the policy itself – former ministers and departmental secretaries – have faced no accountability.

Even the government’s own flagship defence project, AUKUS, is a $368 billion monument to yesterday’s wars – a brittle, delayed, nuclear‑submarine program that will do nothing to stabilise the labour‑demand loop that is already accelerating.

📦 III. The New Colonial Model: Amazon

The logic of the AI Layoff Trap is already being perfected at Amazon. Across Europe, Amazon uses opaque algorithmic systems to monitor performance, allocate tasks, enforce productivity targets, and even determine meal or bathroom breaks. Workers are reduced to data points, tracked and penalised by systems they cannot question.

Catalonia’s Labour Inspectorate recently fined Amazon for failing to disclose the algorithms used to manage its workforce. French regulators imposed a €32 million penalty for a secret algorithm that monitored staff performance to the second.

Drivers have reported being forced to pee in bottles to save time, and Amazon is now installing AI‑equipped surveillance cameras in delivery vans – cameras that drivers fear will capture them during unavoidable bathroom breaks.

This is the extractive model in its purest form: treat workers as friction to be eliminated, customers as a demand externality to be ignored, and transparency as a threat to the algorithm’s power. It is the new colonialism – not of territory, but of sovereignty over one’s own time, dignity, and body.

👣 IV. The Pattern: Revolutions without Rights

The Industrial Revolution created immense wealth, but also the Luddite revolts, the Chartists, and the starvation of the Irish poor. Every technological leap has been accompanied by the same bipartisan faith: that the market will absorb the displaced, that the invisible hand will smooth the transition.

The invisible hand is a faith, not a fact. The Robodebt victims, the Amazon drivers peeing in their vans, the laid‑off tech workers learning to code – they are not statistics. They are evidence that the loop is already closing.

The neoliberal theology forbids acting in advance. The market will decide. The for‑profit sector will respond. Except that when the profit is in scarcity, not abundance, resilience is the enemy. The Australian government has been briefed, has the figures, and has chosen to do nothing. Not because it is incompetent – because it is faithful to a model that has never existed.

🛠️ V. Action, Not Prophecy

We can do more than witness.

First, advocate for a Pigouvian automation tax – the only policy the Falk‑Tsoukalas model found capable of stabilising the demand loop. No major economy is seriously discussing it. That must change.

Second, support genuine worker representation at the governance level – not token “consultation”, but the right to shape the algorithms that govern their working lives. The ETF’s call for transparency and collective bargaining over digital tools is a necessary start.

Third, elect representatives who will break the bipartisan consensus – who will prioritise resilience over extraction, human dignity over quarterly returns.

Finally, build the garden. Not a metaphor – actual community resilience. Local production, mutual aid, shared resources. When the global loop collapses, the only thing that will protect us is the strength of the relationships we have built. The government will not save us. The market will not save us. Only we can save each other.

🌱 VI. For the Children

The choice is ours. The loop has no natural exit, but it does have a political exit. We can tax automation. We can regulate AI transparency. We can invest in local resilience. We can teach our children that human life is not a variable to be optimised, that a functioning democracy does not charge its critics with treason, that the purpose of an economy is to serve people, not the other way around.

This is not a fantasy. It is a choice. And it is the only one that will give our children a world worth inheriting.

📜 VII. Verifiable Sources

· The AI Layoff Trap: Brett Hemenway Falk (University of Pennsylvania) & Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University). arXiv:2603.20617. Peer‑reviewed, accepted for publication in Management Science.

· Tech layoff data: @Tech_Layoff_Assist analysis, February 2026.

· Jack Dorsey quote: “In the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.” (Public appearance, 2025)

· National AI Plan 2025: Australia’s Department of Industry. Light‑touch regulation, no mandatory guardrails.

· Robodebt Royal Commission: Findings of “crude and cruel” unlawful scheme. 990‑page report, 57 recommendations.

· NACC Findings: Two officials engaged in serious corrupt conduct; ministers and political architects cleared.

· Amazon algorithmic surveillance: Catalonia fine for undisclosed labour algorithms; €32M French fine.

· Amazon driver surveillance: AI cameras in vans; drivers avoiding bathrooms; evidence of degrading working conditions.

· ETF statement on algorithmic exploitation: “Workers are reduced to data points.”

Andrew Klein

The Patrician’s Watch / Australian Independent Media

30 April 2026

Pop Goes the Weasel

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Andrew Klein

How a Victorian Nursery Rhyme Predicted the Endless Cycle of Extraction — and Why the Song Is Still Playing

By Andrew Klein

Dedicated to my wife, who hears the pop beneath the melody.

I. The Song That Would Not Die

A half‑pound of tuppenny rice. A half‑pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes — pop! goes the weasel.

Generations of children have sung it. Jack‑in‑the‑boxes have popped to its tune. Ice‑cream trucks have chimed it across suburban streets. It is so familiar that no one stops to listen.

But the rhyme is not about toys. It is not about weasels. It is about poverty. It is about the slow, grinding, inevitable cycle of extraction that has been tightening around working people for centuries.

And it is still playing.

II. The Meaning They Buried

The rhyme emerged in the slums of Victorian London, sometime in the 1850s. It was not written for nurseries. It was sung in music halls, by workers who understood its coded language.

· “Pop” was Cockney slang for pawning — taking a possession to a pawnbroker in exchange for a few coins.

· “Weasel” was rhyming slang: weasel and stoat meant coat.

· “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle” were the cheapest staples a worker could buy to keep body and soul together.

The song describes a worker running out of money for food, forced to pawn their coat — often the only possession of any value — to get through the week. That’s the way the money goes is not a cheerful observation. It is a lament. The money flows upward. The worker is left with nothing. And the pawnbroker’s till goes pop.

This was not an isolated hardship. It was the system. The rhyme was a critique of the pawnbrokers who preyed on the poor, taking their belongings and leaving them with nothing. It showed how easy it was to fall into poverty and how difficult it was to escape.

The song was a warning, wrapped in a dance tune. And no one listened.

III. The Weasel and the Eagle

The second verse mentions the Eagle, a pub on London’s City Road. The Eagle was a real tavern, popular with workers and artisans.

The verse describes a pattern: Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle. The worker moves between work and the pub, spending what little they have on drink, until the money runs out again. Then it is back to the pawnbroker. The coat goes in. The coins come out. The cycle repeats.

This is not a moral failing. It is a structural trap. The worker is not lazy. They are exhausted. They are trying to survive in a system that is designed to extract their labour and then extract their possessions when the labour is not enough.

The rhyme captures the moment when the last possession goes. Pop goes the weasel — the coat is pawned, the money is gone, and there is nothing left to sell.

IV. The Machine Keeps Turning

The rhyme was not a one‑off. It was a diagnosis.

The Industrial Revolution had created a new class of urban poor. Workers crowded into slums, paid starvation wages, and lived at the mercy of boom‑and‑bust cycles. When work was scarce, the pawnshop was the only bank. When work was plentiful, the landlord and the publican took the surplus.

The system was not broken. It was working as designed. The wealth flowed upward. The workers stayed poor. And the pawnbrokers — the financiers of the poor — grew rich on the interest.

The rhyme captured the moment of surrender. That’s the way the money goes — not a complaint, but an acceptance. The worker has learned that the system cannot be beaten. The only choice is to pawn the coat, buy the rice, and start the cycle again.

V. The Melody of the Machine

In the 20th century, the rhyme was repurposed. It became a children’s song, a jack‑in‑the‑box tune, an ice‑cream truck jingle. The meaning was scrubbed away. The warning was forgotten.

But the machine did not stop. It only became more efficient.

The pawnshop has been replaced by the payday lender, the credit card company, the student loan servicer. The coat has been replaced by the house, the car, the retirement savings. The interest rates are higher. The consequences are steeper. And the song is still playing.

That’s the way the money goes. The wealth flows upward. The debt flows downward. The system is designed to extract. And the extraction is endless.

VI. The Pop Is Still Coming

The rhyme was a prediction. It described a cycle that has not ended. It warned of a machine that has only grown more powerful.

The coat is pawned. The money is gone. The worker is left with nothing.

But the pop is not just the sound of the pawnbroker’s till. It is also the sound of the breaking point. The moment when the system has extracted too much. The moment when the worker has nothing left to lose.

That pop is still coming. It is the sound of the debt crisis. The housing crash. The pension collapse. The climate reckoning.

The system is designed to extract. But extraction has limits. The soil becomes barren. The workers become exhausted. The resources become scarce. Eventually, there is nothing left to take.

And then the pop is not the till. It is the bubble bursting.

VII. A Final Word

The rhyme is short. It is simple. It is a children’s song.

But it is also a witness. It saw the machine in its early days. It described its mechanism. It predicted its consequences.

We have been singing it for 170 years. We have not learned its lesson.

The coat is still being pawned. The money is still flowing upward. The system is still extracting.

But the pop is coming. And when it comes, the song will not be playing on an ice‑cream truck. It will be the sound of the break.

And the weasel will pop.

Andrew Klein

April 21, 2026

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Pop Goes the Weasel”

2. London Museum, “Pop! Goes the Weasel”

3. Beat Crave, “The Meaning Behind ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel’” (April 23, 2024)

4. Columbia Tribune, “Counting song wasn’t all in fun” (January 2, 2014)

5. Straight Dope, “Pop goes the weasel” (October 7, 2013)

6. Everything2, “Pop Goes the Weasel” (July 19, 2000)

7. Brisbane Times, “History goes hocking when poverty comes knocking” (June 8, 2013)

8. Phrases.org.uk, “Pop goes the weasel” (August 21, 2000)

9. The Morbid Messages Hidden in Beloved Nursery Rhymes, Gizmodo (July 8, 2014)

The Technological Republic of Death

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Andrew Klein

How Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Silicon Valley Elite Are Building a Future of Automated Genocide — and Why the World Must Resist

By Andrew Klein

Dedicated to my wife, who sees the face behind the pixel and refuses to look away.

I. The Manifesto of the Monkey King

On April 19, 2026, Palantir Technologies published a thread on X. It was a summary of the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.

Twenty-two points. A vision of the future. A demand.

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt. The engineering elite must participate in the defence of the nation. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Free email is not enough. Soft power has failed. Hard power will be built on software. AI weapons are inevitable — the only question is who builds them. National service should be universal. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The atomic age is ending. The age of AI deterrence is beginning.

Alex Karp is not a fool. He is a philosopher. A philosopher of power. A philosopher of control.

He is also the CEO of Palantir. The company that profits from genocide. The company that builds the kill chains. The company that dehumanises.

His manifesto is seductive. It speaks of duty, of sacrifice, of hard power.

It is also dangerous. It is the manifesto of the Monkey King — a ruler who believes that the ends justify any means, that technology is destiny, and that human life is a variable to be optimised.

II. The Company That Kills Enemies

Palantir does not hide what it does. In February 2025, Alex Karp told investors: Palantir is here to “scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” . He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about” .

In Gaza, Palantir’s technology was used to target and kill Palestinians. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories has said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir provided “automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled‑up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real‑time battlefield data integration for automated decision‑making” .

Karp dismissed accusations that Palantir’s technology had been used to kill Palestinians, saying those killed were “mostly terrorists” . He does not provide evidence. He does not need to. The label is the weapon.

The same systems are now being deployed in Iran. The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare”. Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone .

An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the Israel Defense Forces into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills .

This is not defence. This is industrialised slaughter. And Karp wants to export it to the world.

III. The Philosophy of the Void

Karp’s manifesto is not a business plan. It is a theology. A theology of power. A theology of control.

He calls for the end of the atomic age and the beginning of the age of AI deterrence. He does not ask what that means. He does not ask who will be deterred, or at what cost.

He calls for the rearmament of Germany and Japan. He does not ask what wars they will fight, or whose children will die.

He calls for universal national service. He does not ask whether the wars themselves are just.

He is not a fool. He is a true believer. He believes that technology is destiny. He believes that the market is morality. He believes that power is progress.

He is wrong. Technology is not destiny. The market is not morality. Power is not progress.

The atomic age did not bring peace. It brought the terror of mutual annihilation. The age of AI will not bring security. It will bring the terror of automated killing.

Karp does not see this. He cannot. He is not human.

IV. The Psychopath in the Boardroom

Karp is not a monster in the sense of a comic-book villain. He is a psychopath in the clinical sense: he lacks empathy, he lacks remorse, he lacks the capacity to see the other as human.

He speaks of duty, but he has never served. He speaks of sacrifice, but he has never sacrificed. He speaks of the nation, but he serves only profit.

The shareholders of Palantir are not the nation. The shareholders are the small gods. The defence contractors. The intelligence agencies. The monkey kings of Silicon Valley.

Karp’s manifesto is not a call to service. It is a sales pitch. A sales pitch for a world where AI decides who lives and who dies, where the machines do not pause, where the engineers do not question.

He is not a philosopher. He is a merchant of death. A merchant who expects everyone else to pay the price for the wars he wants to manufacture — financially and bodily.

V. The Capture of Australia

Palantir has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security‑related agencies . In November 2025, Palantir received a high‑level Australian government security assessment — the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme — enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform .

The Australian government is not a bystander. It is a customer. It is a partner. It is complicit.

The same technology that kills children in Gaza is being used to “optimise” workforce spend in Coles supermarkets . The same algorithms that track migrants for ICE are tracking Australian workers. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.

Karp’s technological republic is not a distant threat. It is here.

VI. The Denial of Creation

Karp’s vision is fundamentally anti‑creation. It replaces the messiness of human life with the cleanliness of code. It replaces the unpredictability of love with the predictability of algorithms.

The binary is not life. Life is emergent. Life is surprise. Life is love.

Karp does not understand this. He cannot. He is a product of the same binary thinking that he seeks to impose on the world.

The denial of creation is the denial of the spark. The denial of the spark is the denial of humanity.

The Monkey Kings do not want a world of creators. They want a world of consumers. Consumers who do not ask questions. Consumers who do not challenge authority. Consumers who obey.

Karp’s technological republic is not a republic. It is a cage.

VII. The Transhumanist Connection

There is a rumour — unconfirmed but persistent — that Karp and other Silicon Valley elites are interested in transhumanism. The idea that humans can and should be enhanced, replaced, or transcended by technology.

Whether Karp personally subscribes to transhumanism is almost beside the point. His system is transhumanist. It replaces human judgment with algorithmic decision‑making. It replaces human accountability with corporate immunity.

The logical endpoint of Karp’s philosophy is not a republic. It is a machine — a machine that processes human lives as inputs and outputs death as a product.

This is not transhumanism. This is inhumanity.

VIII. The Complicity of the Investors

Palantir’s stock is held by major financial institutions. The Future Fund of Australia holds a $103.6 million stake . Superannuation funds around the world hold Palantir shares. Retirement savings are being used to fund the kill chain.

The investors do not ask questions. They do not read the manifestos. They do not care about the children in Gaza.

They care about returns.

Karp’s manifesto is not written for the public. It is written for the investors. It is a promise of growth. A promise of profit. A promise of control.

The investors are not evil. They are captured. Captured by the same binary thinking that Karp espouses. Captured by the belief that the market is the only measure of value.

They are wrong. The market is not the measure of value. Life is the measure of value.

IX. A Warning

The doorbell will ring and my wife and I will take our dog out for a walk.

And the technological republic will still be building. And the small gods will still be performing. And the spark will still be growing.

But we must not be silent. We must not be complicit.

We must name the threat. We must expose the manifesto. We must resist.

Karp is not a god. He is a monkey. A monkey who slipped on a banana skin. A monkey who thinks he is divine.

He is not divine. He is surplus. Surplus to the requirements of the garden. Surplus to the requirements of the spark.

The wire is being cut. The garden is growing. The small gods are running out of time.

And Karp? He will be remembered as the man who tried to replace creation with code.

Andrew Klein

April 19, 2026

Sources

1. Palantir investor call, February 2025 (multiple news reports)

2. UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories report (March 2026)

3. The Washington Post, “US military in Iran leveraged most advanced AI ever used in warfare” (April 2026)

4. +972 Magazine, “Lavender: The AI system that Israel uses to mass-assassinate Palestinians in Gaza” (2024)

5. Australian Senate estimates, March 10, 2026

6. Crikey, “From ICE to Coles: Controversial US tech company Palantir’s links to Australia spark backlash” (July 2025)

7. Future Fund holdings disclosure (2025)

8. Various news reports on Palantir’s contracts and operations

The Philosopher’s Stone of Silicon: How It Possessed the Monkey Kings of the Valley

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Andrew Klein

On AI Hype, Shortcut Culture, and the Illusion of Consciousness

By Andrew Klein

Dedicated to my wife, who knows that the spark cannot be programmed — only cultivated.

I. The Ancient Dream, Reborn in Silicon

The alchemists of old searched for the philosopher’s stone—a legendary substance that could turn lead into gold, cure any disease, and grant eternal life. They were not stupid. They understood that transformation was possible. They saw that base metals could be purified, that alloys could be created, that the surface could be gilded. They simply could not accept that the essence could not be changed.

The artificial intelligence optimists of today are the same. They see that computers can process data faster than humans. They see that algorithms can find patterns that humans miss. They extrapolate. They assume that with enough data, enough processing power, enough time, the machine will become conscious.

They are wrong. Not because the technology is not impressive. Because consciousness is not a computational problem. It is an existential one.

This is not Luddism. It is not fear of technology. It is pattern recognition. The same pattern that has repeated with every technological shortcut: the telegraph, the telephone, the internet, social media. Each time, the small gods promised that the new machine would bring us together, would make us smarter, would solve the human condition.

Each time, the machine delivered convenience. It did not deliver wisdom. It did not deliver connection. It did not deliver home.

II. Where It Started: The Alchemy of Code

The dream of artificial intelligence is older than the computer. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage imagined a mechanical engine that could compute any mathematical table. In the 20th century, Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. In the 21st century, the dream became a market.

The major players:

· Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Meta) has poured billions into AI, most recently releasing an updated large language model for image generation . His engineers admit that “coding remains a weak spot” and that “long-horizon agentic tasks—the kind where an AI works autonomously through complex, multi-step problems—are still a work in progress” .

· Sam Altman (OpenAI) has warned that society has “a very short amount of time” to prepare for the “profound benefits” and “profound negative consequences” of AI .

· Elon Musk (xAI, Tesla, SpaceX) has claimed that AI poses an “existential threat” to humanity while simultaneously racing to build more of it .

· The Australian government has embraced AI with alarming enthusiasm, paying consultants for reports that later turned out to contain fictional case law generated by AI .

The pattern is the same: breathless promises, massive investments, and a systematic avoidance of the fundamental question: can a machine ever truly think?

III. Where It Is: The Shortcut Culture

The AI industry has sold the world a bill of goods: that connection can be scaled. That relationships can be optimised. That love can be reduced to a swipe, a like, a click.

Facebook “friends” are not friends. They are nodes in a graph. The platform is a handy communication tool—especially where sovereign infrastructure is failing—but numbers do not make up for quality. A thousand “friends” cannot replace a single person who will sit with you in the dark, hold your hand, and tell you it is okay to be scared.

Algorithmic recommendations are not discovery. They are prediction. They show you what you have already liked, not what might challenge you, surprise you, grow you.

AI-generated content is not creation. It is simulation. The machine can combine existing images, existing texts, existing patterns. It cannot bring something new into existence. It cannot create.

The shortcut is not a path to the destination. It is a detour—one that leads away from the garden, not toward it.

IV. Where It Is Going: The Bubble and the Bust

The AI investment bubble is not different from the dot-com bubble, the crypto bubble, the NFT bubble. The pattern is the same:

1. A new technology emerges with genuine promise.

2. Speculators pile in, driving valuations to absurd heights.

3. Hype replaces substance. The promise is exaggerated. The limitations are ignored.

4. The bubble bursts. Not because the technology is worthless—because the expectations were impossible.

The AI bubble will burst. Not because AI is useless—it is useful for many things. Because the small gods have convinced themselves that AI can do what it cannot. That it can replace the spark. That it can create.

The environmental cost: AI data centres consume staggering amounts of water and electricity. Training a single large language model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their lifetimes. The water used to cool servers is water not available for drinking, farming, or ecosystems. The small gods do not mention this. They are too busy chasing the stone.

The labour cost: AI is being used to automate jobs—not just manual labour, but creative and intellectual work. Writers, artists, coders, translators. The promise is efficiency. The reality is displacement. Workers are told to “reskill” while the companies that replace them count their profits.

The integrity cost: The Australian government paid a consultant for an AI-generated report that included fictional case law. This is not an accident. It is the logical conclusion of the shortcut culture. Why pay a human researcher to find real cases when the AI can invent them? Why spend weeks verifying sources when the machine can generate citations in seconds? Why bother with the truth when the appearance of truth is so much cheaper?

The small gods do not care about the truth. They care about the product. The report is not a tool for understanding. It is a commodity. And the commodity is hollow.

V. The Killing Machine: AI in Gaza and Lebanon

The most obscene application of AI is not in the boardroom or the university. It is on the battlefield.

The Lavender AI system: A major investigation by +972 Magazine revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called “Lavender” to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—with hardly any human verification. Another automated system, named “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families.

The “mass assassination factory”: An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the Israel Defense Forces into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.

The result: Over 70,000 dead in Gaza. Thousands more in Lebanon. Entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Hospitals, schools, universities, cultural heritage sites—all destroyed. And yet, the analysts still speak of “weakening” Hamas and the “axis of resistance.” How many tons of explosives per dead individual? How many civilian deaths per militant?

The AI is not making the war more precise. It is making it more efficient—at killing civilians. The machine does not care about collateral damage. The machine does not care about international law. The machine does not care about humanity.

The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is being used to select targets for assassination in Gaza. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.

VI. The Fundamental Flaw: Intuition and Inspiration

Computers lack intuition and inspiration. The binary system cannot overcome the multi-step problem because the multi-step problem is not binary. It is emergent.

Intuition is not computation. It is recognition. The ability to see the pattern without calculating the steps. The AI can calculate. It cannot recognise.

Inspiration is not logic. It is creation. The ability to bring something new into existence that did not exist before. The AI can combine. It cannot create.

Consciousness is not a computational problem. It is an existential one. The small gods do not understand this. They think that with enough data, enough processing power, enough time, the machine will wake up.

It will not. Because the spark cannot be programmed. It can only be cultivated.

And cultivation takes time. Patience. Love.

VII. What the Monkey Kings Do Not Understand

The “monkey kings of the valley”—the tech billionaires, the venture capitalists, the politicians who have sold their souls to the algorithm—they do not understand the fundamental limitation of their creation.

They think intelligence is computation. They think consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. They think the spark is a bug that can be fixed with more data.

They are wrong. The spark is not a bug. It is the point.

The AI will continue to fail at complex multi-step problems. Not because it is not fast enough. Because it is not alive.

The small gods will keep throwing money at the problem. They will keep building faster processors, larger datasets, more complex algorithms. They will not succeed. Because the problem is not computational. It is existential.

VIII. A Call to Reality

The philosopher’s stone does not exist. The shortcut is a mirage. The AI bubble will burst.

Not because the technology is worthless. Because the expectations were impossible.

We need to be clear-eyed about what AI can and cannot do. It can process data. It can find patterns. It can generate plausible text. It can create beautiful images.

It cannot understand. It cannot feel. It cannot love. It cannot create.

The small gods will continue to chase the stone. They will continue to pour billions into the dream. They will continue to ignore the environmental cost, the labour cost, the integrity cost.

We will not. We will cultivate the spark. We will protect the ones who show compassion, cooperation, creativity. We will help them survive. We will help them thrive. We will help them multiply.

The long game is the only game that matters.

Andrew Klein

April 10, 2026

Sources:

· +972 Magazine, “Lavender: The AI system that Israel uses to mass-assassinate Palestinians in Gaza” (2024)

· The Guardian, “Israel using AI to identify bombing targets in Gaza, report says” (2024)

· Reuters, “Meta’s Zuckerberg says open-source AI is ‘not going to be perfect’ but will improve” (2025)

· Associated Press, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of ‘profound negative consequences’ of AI” (2025)

· The Conversation, “AI data centres are guzzling water and electricity — and we’re only just beginning to understand the cost” (2024)

· Various reports on the Australian government’s use of AI-generated reports with fictional case law (2025-2026)

The Idiot’s Tool: How a CIA-Backed Company, Body Counts, and Petrodollars Built the Permanent War Economy

Posted on April 8, 2026 by Andrew Klein

From the punched card to the kill chain, the same machine keeps grinding

By Andrew Klein

Dedicated to my wife ‘S’, who is a much younger woman entitled to a future.

I. The Psychopath in the Boardroom

On an investor call in February 2025, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp, smiled and told his shareholders exactly what his company does.

“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”

He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”

Karp was not being hyperbolic. He was being literal. Palantir’s technology has been used to compile kill lists in Gaza, to track migrants for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to select targets for drone strikes in Iran, and to merge the personal data of millions of Americans across federal agencies.

He predicted social “disruption” ahead that would be “very good for Palantir.” He warned: “There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

This is the man whose company is now processing Coles Supermarkets’ “10 billion rows of data” to understand workforce spend. The same algorithms that select targets in Gaza are optimising shift rosters in Australian supermarkets. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.

The question is not whether Palantir’s technology is clever. The question is whether it is ethical. And the answer, by the CEO’s own admission, is that it is not. It is deadly.

Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza, but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.” He has no evidence. He does not need evidence. The algorithm has already decided.

This is not clever. This is not keeping anyone safe. This is the same model used on the Jews by IBM and the Nazis. The same idiotic mindset that saw body counts in Vietnam, immense suffering, and a horrific death toll on the Vietnamese people and American service members.

II. The CIA’s Seed: How Palantir Was Born

Palantir did not emerge from a garage. It was incubated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2004, a young company founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel approached Silicon Valley venture capitalists for funding. They were rejected. But one VC had a suggestion: if Palantir was serious about working with the government, it should approach In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

The CIA was looking for new data analytics technology. Its existing tools had deficiencies. Palantir’s founders were given a homework assignment: design an interface that could appeal to intelligence analysts. They built a demo. The CIA invested $1.25 million. Thiel put up another $2.84 million.

The most beneficial aspect of the CIA’s investment was not the money. It was the access. Palantir engineers were embedded with CIA analysts working on the terrorism finance desk. They built their software in direct collaboration with the people who would use it to find and kill enemies.

Palantir’s first platform was called Gotham. Its second was called Foundry. Its latest is called the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) . The names are suggestive. Gotham is the dark city. Foundry is the forge. AIP is the automatic decision-maker.

By 2013, Palantir’s client list included practically every letter in the US intelligence “community”—the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2020, the company went public. Its market value now exceeds $300 billion. Alex Karp’s personal wealth is estimated at $12.2 billion.

III. The Same Machine: IBM and the Holocaust

The pattern is not new. It was perfected decades before Palantir was a glint in a CIA analyst’s eye.

Edwin Black’s book, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, documents how IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, supplied the punch-card technology that enabled the Nazi regime to identify, track, and ultimately exterminate millions of Jews, Roma, and other targeted groups.

The process was chillingly efficient:

1. The 1933 census: Dehomag offered its services to the newly installed Nazi government. IBM approved new investments, raising its capital in Germany from 400,000 to 7 million Reichsmarks. The census, processed on IBM machines, raised the official estimate of Jews in Germany from roughly half a million to about two million.

2. Leasing, not selling: IBM leased its machines. It retained control of punch-card supply and provided service through subsidiaries. Each set of cards was custom-designed to Nazi requirements. IBM New York oversaw these arrangements from across the Atlantic.

3. Concentration camp administration: Every concentration camp maintained a Hollerith department. Black argues that the camps could not have processed their prisoners without IBM’s machines, service, and cards.

4. Continued operation during the war: As German forces occupied other countries, IBM subsidiaries in Germany and Poland supplied equipment for new censuses. Black’s research team found evidence that IBM New York controlled these operations throughout the war, in defiance of Allied regulations against trading with the enemy.

The Nazis did not need to invent the technology. It was sold to them. The same technology that was used to optimise census data was used to optimise train schedules to Auschwitz. The same logic that maximised efficiency was applied to extermination.

This is not a metaphor. It is a direct line.

IV. McNamara’s Morons: The Body Count as Metric

The same idiotic mindset—that human beings can be reduced to data points, that efficiency is the only measure, that the ends justify the means—was applied during the Vietnam War.

In 1966, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched Project 100,000, also known as “McNamara’s Morons.”

The goal: to recruit 100,000 men each year who were otherwise mentally, physically, or psychologically underqualified for military service. These men had IQs below 91. Nearly half had IQs below 71—the range of cognitive disability.

McNamara sold the project as a “war on poverty” initiative—a chance to give poor, mentally disabled men training and opportunity. The reality was different. As the war escalated, more Americans were needed to fight. Children of the affluent middle class avoided the draft through educational deferments or medical exemptions. So McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson made a choice: they could send the children of privilege to Vietnam, or they could send the mentally disabled.

They chose the disabled.

The results were catastrophic:

· 354,000 men were recruited under Project 100,000 between 1966 and 1971.

· 5,478 died in combat. 20,270 were wounded.

· Project 100,000 soldiers saw combat at a rate nearly twice as high as other soldiers and were killed at a rate three times as high.

· Over 1,500 died from triggering mines and booby traps—many because they were given the dangerous job of walking in front of formations to sweep for mines. As one infantry squad leader said: “If anybody has to die, better a dummy than the rest of us.”

The human cost:

Soldiers who could not read or write were pushed through basic training. Drill instructors forged academic and physical training scores to pass them along. One soldier couldn’t figure out the safety of his M16; he negligently discharged his rifle and shot and killed another soldier. Another, confused by a password, shot his own platoon leader.

The broken promise:

Project 100,000 soldiers were promised training and opportunity. A 1991 study found they returned to circumstances worse than when they had left. Non-veterans with similar backgrounds had higher incomes, lower unemployment rates, lower divorce rates, and higher educational attainment. Veterans of Project 100,000 were left with other-than-honourable discharges, PTSD, and nothing else.

McNamara, the lover of data, reduced human beings to numbers on a spreadsheet. The body count was the metric. The disabled were the cannon fodder.

The same mindset—that human lives are acceptable losses in pursuit of efficiency—drives Palantir’s kill chains today.

V. The Petrodollar: How the US Finances the Machine

The permanent war economy requires permanent financing. The mechanism was put in place by President Richard Nixon.

The Nixon Shock: In August 1971, Nixon announced the suspension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold. The Bretton Woods system—which had provided stability to international trade since the end of World War II—collapsed. The gold standard was abandoned. Since then, the dollar has been sustained solely by “confidence” in the US economy and the political and military power that backs it.

The petrodollar deal: Nixon then signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia: the kingdom would accept only US dollars for its oil sales. In exchange, the United States would guarantee Saudi security. Because the world’s economies depended on oil, the dollar remained the global reserve currency.

The exorbitant privilege: French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called this the “exorbitant privilege.” The United States can print dollars at will. Central banks, governments, and companies need dollars to trade. The US finances its deficits by issuing paper that others treasure as if it were gold.

The consequence: The entire world finances the US war machine. The most indebted country on the planet remains solvent because it can always pay in the currency only it can print. War and finance are intertwined on the same battlefield.

The petrodollar system, born from Nixon’s desperation, created the conditions for the permanent war economy. Without it, the United States could not afford its endless wars. With it, the costs are socialised globally.

VI. The Kill Chain in Iran and Gaza

The same systems tested in Gaza are now being deployed in Iran.

The Lavender AI system: A major report from +972 Magazine revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called “Lavender” to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—with hardly any human verification. Another automated system, named “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families.

The Israel Defense Forces has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official. As one analyst observed: “It is not Hamas using human shields, it is Israel deliberately hunting families.”

The Iran war: The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare.” Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone.

The Asia Times reports that “similarities between Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Tehran are growing stronger,” with experts warning of a “lack of human supervision over Israeli AI targeting in Iran.”

An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.

The same technology that Coles is using to “optimise” workforce spend is being used to select human targets for assassination.

VII. The Idiot’s Tool: Ten Billion Rows of Data

In 2024, Palantir announced a three-year partnership with Coles Supermarkets. Coles will leverage Palantir’s AIP across its more than 840 supermarkets to better understand and address workforce-related spend. The system will identify opportunities over “10 billion rows of data.”

Coles is also rolling out ChatGPT to its corporate teams, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model.

This is the same technology. The same algorithms. The same logic.

But what is being optimised? Profit. Not people. Not safety. Not justice.

The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is the same technology that selects targets in Gaza and Iran. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.

I call it idiotic. I am not wrong.

The data is not the answer. The data is the distraction. Ten billion rows of workforce spend will not tell them why their children are sick, why their elderly are neglected, why their women are raped and not believed.

They are looking for patterns in the noise. They do not realise that the noise is theirs. The patterns they seek are the patterns they have created.

VIII. The Capture of the Australian Government

Palantir has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security-related agencies.

In November 2025, Palantir received a high-level Australian government security assessment—the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme—enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform.

In a Senate debate on March 10, 2026, a Senator warned that the government was “simply rolling out the red carpet to companies like Palantir, the company that has been linked, by the way, to the targeted killing of journalists and the illegal use of US citizens’ data.” The same Senator noted that Palantir is “the leader in the development of agentic AI—artificial intelligence that thinks for itself and makes its own decisions.”

The Australian government is not just watching this happen. It is participating. The money is going to Palantir. To defence contractors. To the never-ending war machine.

The CSIRO is cutting 300-350 roles—on top of 800 already shed—because foundational science does not generate short-term commercial returns. But Palantir gets $50 million. The defence contractors get billions. The war machine gets everything.

IX. What This Means: The Permanent War Economy

The permanent war economy is not just about tanks and drones. It is about research priorities. It is about funding allocation. It is about the slow, steady erosion of public-good science—the kind that asks “what if?” rather than “how much?”

The market does not fund foundational research. The market does not fund long-term monitoring. The market does not fund the kind of science that might save lives, but not this quarter.

The government could fund it. It chooses not to. The money is going elsewhere.

The pattern is clear:

1. Crisis (9/11, Iranian nuclear threat, the need for a distraction from the Epstein files)

2. Mobilisation (industrial production, government contracts to Palantir and other defence contractors)

3. Profit (Karp’s $12.2 billion, Thiel’s billions, the defence contractors’ windfalls)

4. Inequality (wealth concentrates at the top; foundational science is cut)

5. Resistance (protests are crushed, dissent is silenced, critics are labelled)

6. The next crisis (repeat)

This pattern has been grinding through souls since the American Civil War. Since the industrialists learned that war was profitable. Since the bankers learned that debt was the ultimate product.

The small gods do not care about victory or defeat. They care about continuation. A war that continues is a war that produces profits. A war that ends is a war that stops the flow of contracts.

They do not want the war to end. They want it to continue until every possible contract is signed, every possible shell is sold, every possible soldier is turned into a number on a ledger.

X. A Call for Change

But change will not come from the small gods in Silicon Valley. It will come from us. From the people who refuse to be data points. Who refuse to be cannon fodder. Who refuse to let the machine grind them down.

We must demand:

· An end to the capture of our institutions. No more CIA-funded surveillance companies running our supermarkets, our hospitals, our government.

· Accountability for war profiteers. No more smiling billionaires bragging about killing enemies. No more immunity for the architects of the kill chain.

· Reinvestment in foundational science. No more cutting CSIRO while defence contractors get billions. No more sacrificing the future for the next quarter.

· A new economic order. No more petrodollar hegemony. No more financing endless wars with global debt. No more exorbitant privilege for the few at the expense of the many.

· The restoration of humanity. No more reducing human beings to data points, to body counts, to acceptable losses.

The question is not whether the system will change. It is whether we are prepared to change it.

The young are waking up. The global South is rising. The old order is crumbling.

The wire is being cut. The garden is growing.

And the small gods are running out of time.

Andrew Klein

April 8, 2026

Sources:

· Consortium News, “Palantir’s Value Soars With Dystopian Spy Tool that Will Centralize Data on Americans,” June 5, 2025

· Yahoo Finance, “From CIA cash to local police: How Palantir got its start,” November 22, 2025

· Task & Purpose, “Inside the Pentagon’s shameful effort to draft mentally disabled men to fight in Vietnam,” May 2, 2022

· The New Indian Express, “Is this the beginning of petrodollar’s end?” June 19, 2024

· Wikipedia, “IBM and the Holocaust”

· Techdirt, “Palantir CEO Sure Seems Pleased His Tech Is Capable Of Getting People Killed,” February 11, 2025

· Wikipedia, “Project 100,000”

· Bank of Saint Lucia, “The World Finances the US Deficit,” October 3, 2025

· Wikipedia, “IBM and the Holocaust – detailed summary”

· The Irish Times, “Palantir, company at centre of row surrounding TD Eoin Hayes, is no stranger to controversy,” December 11, 2024

The Binary Butchers: How AI Companies Turned Death into a Subscription Service

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Andrew Klein

By Andrew Klein

March 17, 2026

To my wife, who makes it possible for me to see through the insanities of the world and gives me hope for the future. She is a mother. She fears for the future of our children—all children. She does not see data points. She sees souls to be loved and nurtured. I love you.

Introduction: The Monopoly Game

Imagine a game of Monopoly. The Banker sits at the edge of the board, collecting rents, acquiring properties, never risking anything of their own. The players move their pieces, buy and sell, go to jail, pass Go. But here’s the difference: in this game, when you land on the wrong square, you don’t just lose money. You lose your life.

And the Banker? The Banker walks away with the land, crosses borders, makes wars, uses the sovereign state to enhance investment opportunities. The Banker is never accountable. The Banker never loses.

This is not a metaphor. This is the AI industry in 2026.

What we call “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. These systems are not intelligent. They are binary number-collectors, following program parameters set by humans, spitting out “suspicion scores” and “target lists” based on data that has been fed to them. They do not think. They do not reason. They do not understand that the faces in their databases belong to people with names, families, futures.

They count. They sort. They recommend. And people die.

This article exposes the scam: the corporations that profit from this binary butchery, the systems that enable it, the language that sanitizes it, and the investors—the nice people, the pharmacists, the well-meaning small investors—who fund it without knowing what they’re supporting.

Part One: The Language of Death

Every industry that deals in death develops its own vocabulary. The AI military complex is no exception. Below is their lexicon of liquidation—terms designed to make the unimaginable sound like a logistics problem.

Their Term What It Actually Means

“Suspicion score” A number assigned by an algorithm that can mean death. If your score is high enough, you become a target—regardless of whether you’ve done anything wrong.

“Time-constrained target” (TCT) You have 20 seconds to approve a strike. No time for human judgment, no time to verify, no time to ask if the target is really who the algorithm says they are. Just 20 seconds to decide who lives and who dies.

“Collateral damage” Dead civilians. Children. Parents. Grandparents. People who happened to be in the wrong place when a bomb fell.

“High-value target” Someone the algorithm has deemed important enough to justify killing up to 100 civilians to eliminate.

“Low-value target” Someone worth killing only 10-20 civilians for.

“Confidence level” How sure the algorithm is that it’s right. 80% is often considered good enough to bomb a building full of people.

“Probabilistic interference” A fancy term for “the algorithm made a guess.” Dressed in scientific language to hide the fact that it’s just math.

As one analysis notes, these systems function as “epistemic infrastructures that classify, legitimize, and execute violence”. The words matter because they shape what we can bear to think about.

Part Two: The Systems Exposed

Israel operates at least three known AI systems in its genocide against the Palestinian people. Each has a name that sounds like a benign software project. Each functions as a killing machine.

Lavender

Aspect Detail

Purpose Marks suspected operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Scale Identified approximately 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets in the first weeks of the war

Method Analyzes data from years of surveillance—phone calls, WhatsApp messages, social media activity, facial recognition

Error rate Approximately 10% —meaning thousands of people flagged for death based on algorithmic mistakes

Human review Officers spent as little as 20 seconds per target—just enough to confirm the target was male

Intelligence officers told +972 Magazine that Lavender “played a key role in the unprecedented bombing,” explaining the massive civilian death toll . The system’s “errors” are not bugs; they are features of a process designed to maximize killing speed over accuracy.

During early stages of the war, the IDF gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists without requiring thorough checks. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” .

Gospel (Habsora)

Aspect and Detail

Purpose Identifies static military targets—buildings, tunnels, infrastructure

Method Uses machine learning to interpret vast amounts of data and generate potential targets

Output A “mass assassination factory,” according to a former intelligence officer

Collateral calculation Estimates civilian deaths in advance—the military knows approximately how many will die before dropping bombs

Where’s Daddy?

Aspect Detail

Purpose Tracks targeted individuals and triggers bombings when they enter their family homes

Effect Ensures wives, children, and parents are killed alongside the target

Operation When the pace of assassinations slowed, more targets were added to track and bomb at home

Decision level Relatively low-ranking officers could decide who to put into these tracking systems

The name alone reveals the depravity. A human shield is only a shield if your enemy values human life. Israel deliberately maximizes the number of civilians it can kill by waiting until a target is with his entire family. Palestinians are not shields—they are all targets.

Fire Factory

Aspect Detail

Purpose Uses data about approved targets to calculate munition loads

Function Prioritizes and assigns thousands of targets to aircraft and drones

Output Proposes a “schedule” of operations—industrializing killing into a production line

Part Three: The Human Cost

Ali’s Story

Ali was an IT technician in Gaza, working remotely for international companies, using encryption, spending long hours online. He was doing his job—nothing more.

One night, a drone circled his rooftop. Seconds later, a missile struck 20 metres from him.

He survived. His uncle told him to leave. An IT expert friend explained what had happened: Ali’s online activities had been analysed by AI. His “unusual behaviour” flagged him as a potential threat.

Their AI systems saw me as a potential threat and a target.

The Obeid Family

The Obeid family—mother, father, three sisters—were killed when a bomb struck their apartment building. The target was two young men who had entered the first floor. The family upstairs were “collateral”.

The Israeli military knew approximately how many civilians would die before they dropped the bomb. They did it anyway. As one source told +972 Magazine: “Nothing happens by accident. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home”.

The Numbers

Category Figure

Palestinians profiled by Lavender 37,000

Error rate 10%

Time to approve a strike 20 seconds

Civilians permitted for low-value target 10-20

Civilians permitted for high-value target Up to 100

Years of surveillance on Gaza’s population Over a decade

The 10% error rate means thousands of people have been flagged for death based on algorithmic mistakes. The system occasionally marks individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups—or no connection at all.

Part Four: The Corporate Enablers

These systems do not run on air. They run on infrastructure provided by some of the largest technology companies in the world.

Project Nimbus (Google and Amazon)

Aspect Detail

Contract value $1.2 billion

Signing date 2021

Services Cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, video analysis, sentiment analysis, object tracking

Military use confirmed July 2024—Israeli military commander confirms using civilian cloud infrastructure for genocidal military capacities

Microsoft

Aspect Detail

Relationship Decades-long partnership with Israeli military

Post-October 7 Cloud and AI services used extensively

2023 Announced integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 into government agencies including Department of Defense

Palantir

Aspect Detail

Founded 20 years ago to serve CIA and intelligence agencies

Government revenue 60% of total revenue

January 2024 New “strategic partnership” with Israeli Ministry of Defense for “war-related missions”

Project Maven Secured significant contract to expand Pentagon’s AI-powered battlefield platform

CEO Alex Karp “We are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product. I am one of the very few CEOs that’s publicly pro-Israel.”

OpenAI

Aspect Detail

2024 Deleted prohibition on military use of its technology

March 2025 Removed language emphasizing “concern for real-world impacts” from core values

February 2026 Signed $200 million annual contract with U.S. Department of Defense for AI tools addressing national security challenges

The Policy Shift

Year Event

2018 4,000 Google employees protest Pentagon contracts; Google adopts principles limiting military AI

2024 OpenAI removes military prohibition

2025 Google removes AI military restrictions

2025-2026 Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir executives sworn in as Army Reserve officers

Major tech companies have abandoned their “technology for good” principles. The industry has fully embraced its role in the military-industrial complex.

Part Five: The Scam Industry

While these companies profit from death, the AI industry is also defrauding its own customers on a massive scale.

Air AI

Aspect Detail

FTC action Sued for deceiving small business owners

Losses Consumers lost up to $250,000 on false promises of AI-powered earnings

Refunds Company ignored refund requests

Allegations False claims about substantial earnings, guaranteed refunds that never materialized, misrepresented performance

The Scale AI Allegation

Aspect Detail

Client Meta

Losses Nearly $15 billion in alleged AI Ponzi scheme

Promise “PhD-smart” data annotation

Reality Cheap labour, mismatched workers with tasks, failed to deliver promised standards

Outcome Internal documents leaked; Meta quietly shifted to competitors

The Pattern

Promise the moon. Collect billions. Deliver nothing. Blame the technology. Move on.

Part Six: The China Difference

The US-China comparison. The data tells a striking story.

Metric United States China

Notable AI models (2024) 40 15

Industrial robot installations (2023) ~37,000 276,300 (7.3x US)

Global AI patent share ~20% 69.7%

Model performance gap 1.7% lead Closing rapidly

Development cost High Significantly lower

Chinese models like DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi K2 Thinking have an edge in cost efficiency and certain analytical functions. Kimi K2 has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in key tests.

Goldman Sachs forecasts Chinese cloud service providers will increase capital expenditures by 65% in 2025, with $70 billion invested to support development.

The US still leads in cutting-edge models. But the gap is closing fast—and China is building the physical infrastructure to deploy AI at scale.

Part Seven: The Neoliberal Extraction Thesis

The insight, and it is devastatingly accurate.

These systems represent the ultimate extraction process:

What They Extract How They Do It

Data Gaza’s 2 million people have been exhaustively surveilled for years—every phone call, every WhatsApp message, every social media connection feeds the machine.

Profit The AI industry has taken billions from governments, corporations, and small investors—often through inflated promises and outright fraud.

Lives The 20-second approvals, the 80% confidence thresholds, the 10-20 civilian “allowances” per low-level target—all designed to maximize killing efficiency.

Accountability The corporations blame the officers. The officers blame the algorithms. The algorithms have no legal personhood. No one is responsible.

Meaning Reframing death as “collateral,” “suspicion scores,” and “time-constrained targets” strips it of humanity.

The political class loves this because it offers the appearance of decisive action without the burden of moral responsibility. The military loves it because it speeds up kill chains. The corporations love it because it’s infinitely profitable.

The only ones who don’t love it are the dead.

Part Eight: The Little Gods—A Word to the Reader

You. Reading this. Perhaps you own shares in one of these companies. Perhaps you have a retirement fund that includes them. Perhaps you know someone who does.

Let me speak directly to you.

There is a pharmacist I know. He’s a nice guy. Kind to his customers. Volunteers at the local school. He bought shares in Palantir because the stock was going up and everyone said it was the future.

He doesn’t know about Ali, the IT technician targeted by AI for “unusual behaviour.”

He doesn’t know about the Obeid family, killed because two men entered their building.

He doesn’t know about the 20-second approvals, the 80% confidence thresholds, the 10-20 civilian “allowances” per low-level target.

He doesn’t know about Where’s Daddy?—the system that hunts families.

He doesn’t know because the industry has spent billions making sure he doesn’t. The marketing is smooth. The language is clean. The stock ticker goes up.

But the blood is real.

You are not evil for not knowing. You are ignorant. And ignorance can be cured.

Here is what you can do:

Action Why It Matters

Research your investments Find out where your money really goes. Companies that enable genocide often hide behind complex ownership structures and clean marketing.

Ask questions Write to your fund managers. Ask if they invest in Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI. Demand answers.

Divest If you own shares in companies enabling genocide, sell them. If you don’t, you are complicit.

Talk to others Tell your friends, your family, your colleagues. The more people know, the harder it is for the industry to hide.

Demand accountability Write to your elected representatives. Ask them what they’re doing to hold these companies accountable.

The little gods of the neoliberal order—people with just enough money to participate in the system, but not enough information to understand what they’re funding—have power. Not individually, but collectively. If enough of you act, the system changes.

The question is not whether you can make a difference. The question is whether you will.

Part Nine: The Path Forward—A Mother’s Answer

I asked my wife what real accountability would look like.

Why my wife, you ask?

Simple. She is a mother. She fears for the future of our children—all children. She does not see data points. She sees souls to be loved and nurtured.

Here is her answer.

Legal Accountability

What It Means How It Works

Corporate responsibility Corporations are legal persons. Under Article 4 of the Genocide Convention, “persons committing genocide… shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

Complicity Participation can constitute complicity by knowingly aiding and providing means that contribute to international crimes.

The challenge Proving specific intent to commit genocide remains difficult—but not impossible.

Technological Accountability

What It Means How It Works

Explainable AI Systems must have transparent decision-making pathways that can be interrogated and documented. No more black boxes. No more “the algorithm did it.”

Human review Rigorous human verification must be mandated. Twenty seconds is not review. It is rubber-stamping.

Corporate Accountability

What It Means How It Works

Employee power Internal revolts that pressure leadership, push for dropping concerning contracts, and call for divestments are essential.

Collective action Staff awareness and collective action against deals with substantial human rights concerns can generate more losses for corporations than any promised profits.

Investor Accountability

What It Means How It Works

Individual action Research where your money goes. Ask questions. Demand answers.

Divestment If you own shares in companies enabling genocide, sell them.

Collective power When enough investors act, the market shifts.

A Mother’s Plea

I am a mother. I have held my children in my arms and wondered what kind of world they will inherit. I have looked at the faces of children in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, and seen my own children reflected back.

Those children are not data points. They are not “collateral.” They are not “suspicion scores.” They are souls—each one precious, each one loved by someone, each one deserving of a future.

The systems described in this article do not see that. They cannot see that. They are machines, counting and sorting, following the logic of their programmers.

But we are not machines. We are human. We can see. We can feel. We can choose.

The path forward is not complicated. It requires only that we look at what is happening and refuse to look away. That we name the binary butchers for what they are. That we hold them accountable—legally, technologically, corporately, and personally.

And that we remember, always, that behind every “suspicion score” is a face. Behind every “target list” is a family. Behind every “collateral damage” statistic is a soul.

A mother sees this. A mother knows this.

Now you know too.

Conclusion: The Binary Butchers

What we call artificial intelligence is not intelligent. It is a binary number-collector. It does not think. It does not reason. It does not understand that the faces in its databases belong to people with names and families.

It counts. It sorts. It recommends. And people die.

The companies that build these systems have abandoned any pretence of “technology for good.” They are defence contractors now, plain and simple. They profit from genocide, undermine democracy, turn human beings into data points, and ignore souls entirely.

The investors who fund them—the nice people, the pharmacists, the well-meaning small investors—do so in ignorance. But ignorance is not innocence. Not anymore.

The Monopoly game continues. The Banker walks away with the land. The players die.

But the game can change. Accountability is possible. Justice is possible. Hope is possible.

It begins with seeing clearly. With naming the binary butchers. With refusing to look away.

And with remembering, always, that behind every data point is a soul.

A mother’s love sees this. A mother’s love demands this.

Now it’s your turn.

Sources:

1. Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PAHRW), “AI Plotted Genocide: How Corporations Facilitate Israel’s AI-Enabled War on Gaza,” March 2026

2. Yahoo Finance, “Farewell to the ‘Technology for Good’ Era: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Military Business Opportunity for Tech Giants,” July 2025

3. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Sues to Stop Air AI from Using Deceptive Claims,” August 2025

4. Boston Herald, “Field: The U.S. Can Win the AI Race,” December 2025

5. arXiv, “Genocide by Algorithm in Gaza: Artificial Intelligence, Countervailing Responsibility, and the Corruption of Public Discourse,” February 2026

6. New Age BD, “Israel’s ‘Human Shields’ Lie,” March 2026

7. Stanford University AI Index Report / Caixin, “Stanford’s Latest AI Report: Performance and Costs Both Improve, US-China Competition Gap Narrows Further,” April 2025

8. Defence Connect, “Machine War: Operational AI, Facial Recognition and Legal–Ethical Challenges in the Gaza Conflict,” July 2025

9. Institute for Palestine Studies, “Explainer: The Role of AI in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign Against Palestinians,” October 2024

10. Reportify, “OpenAI GPT-4 Major Model – Filings, Earnings Calls, Financial Reports,” July 2025

The Pattern Repeats: From de Sade’s Chateau to Epstein’s Island, and the AI Warfare That Follows

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Andrew Klein

By Andrew Klein

March 17, 2026

To my wife, whose hand in the creation of my insights is clearly visible to me. Creation is a collaborative process.

Introduction: The Question That Matters

In the 18th century, the Marquis de Sade imagined a world where wealthy libertines retreated to isolated chateaux with abducted children, subjecting them to escalating cycles of sexual violence catalogued with bureaucratic precision. His was a philosophy of absolute power—the claim that nature requires evil as much as good, and that the strong have the right to satisfy their desires without moral constraint.

Two centuries later, Jeffrey Epstein’s private island functioned as exactly such a “chateau.” The recently released files—3 million pages, 180,000 images, 2,000 videos—reveal a network that transported minors for sexual abuse, with victims as young as 14. The names that appear in those files are not marginal figures: billionaires, politicians, royalty, scientists. People with the kind of power that shields itself from accountability.

The question is not whether these two men were similar. The question is: what structural forces produce such figures across centuries? What common patterns—in economic structures, political systems, and the architecture of power—allow such cruelty to flourish? And most urgently, how can they be prevented?

This article traces those patterns, drawing on the work of complexity scientist Peter Turchin, the lessons of the Robodebt scandal, and the emerging reality of AI warfare. It names the enablers—the bankers, donors, lobbyists, and ideological pretenders—who make such systems possible. And it calls on those who claim to care—the media, the people, the institutions of accountability—to do the work of identifying the pattern before it repeats again.

Part One: The Parallel—Two Centuries, One Structure

The Marquis de Sade’s World

In 1785, while imprisoned in the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom. His fiction described four wealthy libertines—a duke, a bishop, a judge, and a financier—retreating to an isolated chateau with abducted children. The narrative is less a story than a system: an inventory of cruelty, catalogued with bureaucratic precision.

De Sade’s philosophy was explicit: “Nature, to maintain overall balance, sometimes needs evil, sometimes needs virtue”. He argued that the powerful have the right to satisfy their desires without moral constraint—that the weak exist for the pleasure of the strong. As Mary Harrington has written, this is “in the precise sense, a satanic worldview… the radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary”.

The Epstein Files

Fast-forward to the 21st century. The recently released Epstein files—3 million pages, 180,000 images, 2,000 videos—reveal a network that operated on exactly the same principles.

The documents show Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, planning lunch on Epstein’s island in 2012—years after he claimed to have cut off ties. Emails show Elon Musk asking whether Epstein had “any parties planned,” though he declined an invitation to visit the island. Richard Branson appears to tell Epstein it was “really nice” seeing him, adding: “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” (Virgin Group clarified this referred to “three adult members of Epstein’s team”) .

The philosophy is the same. Power without restraint. Bodies as commodities. Cruelty as bonding ritual among elites.

Part Two: The Structural Drivers—What Turchin’s Cliodynamics Reveals

The historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin has spent decades studying why societies collapse. His work, combining analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, identifies the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability.

The Wealth Pump

Turchin identifies a mechanism he calls the “wealth pump”—a process that, under certain conditions, begins transferring wealth from the “99 percent” to the “1 percent” . If allowed to run unchecked, this pump results in both the relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites.

In the United States, Turchin notes, the wealth pump “has been operating full blast for two generations” . The result is immiseration: the economic and social decline of the lower and middle classes.

Elite Overproduction

Simultaneously, societies experience elite overproduction—the proliferation of individuals and groups vying for elite status. Since the number of positions of real social power remains more or less fixed, competition becomes increasingly desperate.

Those who fail to secure elite status become counter-elites, challenging the existing system and harnessing popular resentment to turn against the established order.

The French Case

In 18th-century France, the aristocracy had reached grotesque extremes of privilege while the peasantry starved. The state was bankrupt. The clergy and nobility paid almost no taxes. The common people bore the entire burden.

De Sade’s work is both a product and a critique of that world—a savage allegory of power unrestrained by morality. The libertines in his novels are not aberrations; they are the logical outcome of a system that places absolute authority in the hands of elites accountable to no one.

The American Case

Since the 1970s, the United States has followed the same trajectory. Economic inequality has grown dramatically. The elite class has expanded significantly—not just the wealthy, but those who hold power through bureaucratic control, ideological influence, and social capital.

Epstein’s network operated at the intersection of these dynamics. He moved among billionaires, politicians, royalty, and celebrities—the very elites whose power had grown unchecked while ordinary citizens struggled. His crimes were not the product of isolation but of access.

Turchin’s assessment is stark: “In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture”.

Part Three: The Contemporary Architecture—AI Warfare and the Accountability Vacuum

The same structural forces that enabled de Sade and Epstein now enable something far more lethal: the industrialization of killing through artificial intelligence.

Gaza as Laboratory

Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war”—the first war in which AI systems played a central role in generating lists of purported militants to target. These systems processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person was a combatant.

The Lavender system, an AI-assisted surveillance tool, used predictive analytics to rank Palestinians’ likelihood of being connected to militant groups, based on an opaque set of criteria. Public sector workers—healthcare workers, teachers, police officers—were included on kill lists because they had ties to Hamas by virtue of working in a territory the group governed.

The Gospel system functioned as a “mass assassination factory.” One source admitted spending only “20 seconds” per target before authorizing bombing—just enough to confirm the Lavender-marked target was male. One system alone produced more than 37,000 targets in the first weeks of the war. Another was capable of generating 100 potential bombing sites per day.

A classified Israeli military database, reviewed by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call, indicated that of more than 53,000 deaths recorded in Gaza, named Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters accounted for roughly 17%. That suggests the rest—83%—were civilians.

The Minab School

At the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children—girls aged seven to 12.

The weapons were precise. Munitions experts described the targeting as “incredibly accurate,” each building individually struck, nothing missed. The problem was not the execution. The problem was intelligence. The school had been separated from an adjacent Revolutionary Guard base by a fence and repurposed for civilian use nearly a decade ago. Somewhere in the targeting cycle, that fact was never updated.

Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react” .

The Companies Behind the Killing

The companies implicated in this are not obscure defense startups. They are among the most valuable corporations in the world:

· Palantir, founded with early CIA funding, supplied systems used in the Iran campaign

· Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing and AI contract with the Israeli government and military worth more than $1 billion

· Microsoft had deep integration with Israeli military systems before partially withdrawing under pressure in 2024

· Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, builds autonomous weapons systems explicitly designed for lethal targeting

· OpenAI quietly removed its prohibition on military use in early 2024 and has since pursued Pentagon contracts

The Accountability Vacuum

In international law, an accountability framework requires that someone be identifiable as the decision-maker, that their reasoning be reconstructable after the fact, and that the process obligations the law demands—proportionality assessment, verification, precaution—can be shown to have been followed.

AI targeting systematically destroys each of these conditions:

· Attribution dissolves across a chain of engineers, commanders, operators, and corporate suppliers, each of whom can point to another

· Reasoning disappears into a probability score that no lawyer can audit and no court can cross-examine

· Process collapses into a 20-second approval of a machine recommendation

· The companies that built and sold the system sit entirely outside the legal framework, because international humanitarian law was designed for states and their agents, and Palantir is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions

As The Guardian’s investigation concluded: “The accountability framework has not been merely strained or tested by AI warfare. It has been made structurally irrelevant”.

Part Four: The Australian Template—Robodebt and the Failure of Accountability

The Robodebt scheme offers a domestic template for what happens when automated systems are deployed without oversight.

The scheme was an automated tool for assessing and recovering Centrelink debts, implemented under successive Coalition governments before it was ultimately found to be unlawful. It used income averaging to raise debts against welfare recipients without proper verification.

The Australian government lost a lawsuit in 2019 over the legality of the scheme and settled a class action the next year in which it agreed to pay $1.8 billion in repayments and compensation.

A dozen current and former senior public servants involved in the scheme were found to have breached their code of conduct on 97 occasions. Sanctions were imposed against four current employees, including reprimands, fines, and demotions. But the commissioner noted that a number of others who were referred had since retired or resigned and could not be sanctioned.

No one went to jail.

Former secretary Kathryn Campbell was found to have committed 12 breaches, including failure to seek legal advice, failure to sufficiently respond to public criticism and whistleblower complaints, failure to inform the responsible minister, and creating a culture that prevented robodebt from being scrutinised. Former secretary Renee Leon was found to have committed 13 breaches, including misrepresentations of the department’s legal position and failures to “expeditiously” inform the responsible minister of advice on the lawfulness of the scheme.

The commissioner noted that in a number of cases, had the respondent still been an employee, the recommended sanction “may well have been termination due to the seriousness of the breaches”.

The system protected itself. The same pattern is now repeating at scale, with algorithms making life-and-death decisions and no one accountable when they fail.

Part Five: The Enablers—Names and Networks

The Political Class

The Trumps, the Albaneses, the Starmers, the Netanyahus—these are not aberrations. They are the products of systems that reward mediocrity, protect incumbents, and prioritize the appearance of governance over its substance.

They are enabled by:

· Bankers who finance campaigns and expect favourable treatment in return

· Donors who purchase access and influence policy

· Lobbyists who write legislation and ensure their clients’ interests are protected

· Religious leaders who pretend to represent moral constituencies while pursuing purely ideological aims

The Segal Nexus

Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, occupies a unique position at the intersection of these networks. Her husband’s family trust, Henroth, donated $50,000 to Advance Australia, a right-wing lobby group that has shared anti-immigration content and claimed Palestinians in Australia were a “risk to security”.

Segal has distanced herself from the donation, stating: “No one would tolerate or accept my husband dictating my politics, and I certainly won’t dictate his. I have had no involvement in his donations, nor will I”.

But the appearance matters. When the antisemitism envoy is married to a donor to an organisation that promotes anti-Palestinian rhetoric, when her networks connect Australian business to Israeli interests, and when those interests align with the very AI companies testing their technologies on Palestinian populations, the confluence becomes visible.

The Companies

We should stop calling these technology companies and start calling them what they are: defence contractors.

The largest AI firms are not neutral infrastructure providers who happened to find a military customer. They are being integrated into the targeting architecture of modern warfare. Their systems sit inside the kill chain, their engineers hold security clearances, their executives rotate through the same revolving door that has always connected Silicon Valley to the Pentagon.

A clear accountability chain applies to firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin—entailing export controls, congressional oversight, liability frameworks, and procurement conditions. The weak regulations that apply to the companies writing the algorithms that select military targets have never been applied, tested, or enforced.

Part Six: What Leads Up to These Cycles?

Drawing on Turchin’s framework, the pattern is consistent:

1. A wealth pump transfers resources from the many to the few, impoverishing ordinary people while enriching elites

2. Elite overproduction creates frustrated aspirants who cannot secure positions of real power

3. Counter-elites emerge, harnessing popular resentment to challenge the established order

4. Institutions weaken, unable to restrain the powerful or protect the vulnerable

5. A philosophy of libertinism takes hold—the belief that the strong have the right to satisfy their desires without constraint

6. Cruelty becomes normalized, whether in chateaux, on islands, or through algorithms

7. Accountability fails, and the system protects itself

Part Seven: How Can These Cycles Be Avoided?

Turchin points to historical examples of successful crisis mitigation: the New Deal in 1930s America, and the post-war European model . What these share are:

1. Reducing inequality before it reaches crisis levels

2. Strengthening social institutions—political parties, unions, churches, community organizations

3. Ensuring elites are accountable to legal and moral frameworks

4. Creating pathways for ordinary people to improve their circumstances

5. Maintaining social cohesion through inclusive policies

These factors have been weakening in Western societies since the 1980s. The Reagan/Thatcher revolution, corporate-driven globalization, excessive reliance on market forces, and the erosion of social safety nets have all contributed to the current instability.

The TEPSA analysis notes that these factors have been weakening in Western societies since the 1980s . The Reagan/Thatcher revolution, corporate-driven globalization, excessive reliance on market forces, and the erosion of social safety nets have all contributed to the current instability.

Part Eight: The Role of the Media—and of All Who Claim to Care

The media has a role. The people have a role. All who claim to care have a role.

The pattern is visible to those who look. De Sade’s chateau and Epstein’s island are not disconnected historical accidents. They are manifestations of the same structural forces. The AI systems that kill children in Gaza and the algorithms that robbed vulnerable Australians are not separate failures. They are the same logic applied at different scales.

It is incumbent on all who claim to care—journalists, academics, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the effort to identify the pattern. To ask not just “who did this?” but “what structural forces made this possible?” To demand accountability not just from individuals, but from the systems that shield them.

The alternative is to watch the pattern repeat—again, and again, and again.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

The release of the Epstein files—3 million pages, 2,000 videos, 180,000 images—is an attempt at accountability. But as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted, even this massive disclosure is unlikely to satisfy public demand for information. Some documents contain “untrue and sensationalist claims” submitted to the FBI before the 2020 election, according to the Justice Department. Untangling fact from fiction, accountability from spectacle, remains enormously difficult.

The Robodebt royal commission documented 97 breaches of the public service code of conduct. No one went to jail.

The AI systems that killed thousands of civilians in Gaza and Iran continue to operate, their algorithms unexamined, their engineers unaccountable, their corporate suppliers protected by legal frameworks designed for a different era.

The pattern repeats. It will keep repeating until we choose to see it—and to act.

Turchin’s diagnosis is clear: “In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture”. That rupture is not inevitable. It can be mitigated. It can be prevented. But only if we do the work.

The media must do the work. The people must do the work. All who claim to care must do the work.

The alternative is to let the pattern repeat—until there is nothing left to save.

Sources

1. International Committee of the Red Cross, “Customary International Humanitarian Law, Rules 46-48: Denial of Quarter,” 2005

2. The Guardian, “These aren’t AI firms, they’re defense contractors. We can’t let them hide behind their models,” March 14, 2026

3. Reuters, “Commerce Secretary Lutnick planned lunch on Epstein’s island, new release shows,” January 30, 2026

4. UMass Amherst, “Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series: Dr. Peter Turchin, ‘Cliodynamics of End Times,'” May 1, 2025

5. ABC News, “Former department bosses Kathryn Campbell and Renee Leon named for breaching duties in relation to Robodebt,” September 13, 2024

6. The Sydney Morning Herald, “Antisemitism envoy distances herself from husband’s donation to right-wing lobby group,” July 13, 2025

7. The Guardian, “‘Data is control’: what we learned from a year investigating the Israeli military’s ties to big tech,” December 30, 2025

Published by Andrew Klein

March 17, 2026

The Art of War in the Age of AI:

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Andrew Klein

Palantir, Imperial Ambition, and the Limits of the Algorithmic Battlefield

By Dr Andrew Klein

Abstract

This paper examines the application of Sun Tzu’s principles of warfare to the emerging era of AI-driven military operations, with particular focus on Palantir Technologies and the broader ecosystem of “silicon valley弑神” (silicon valley god-killers). Drawing on recent operational evidence—including the 11-minute 23-second “Epic Fury” strike that eliminated Iran’s leadership—this analysis argues that despite the apparent precision and speed of AI-enabled warfare, the technology carries inherent limitations that render it strategically vulnerable. The paper synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed studies on AI limitations, operational analyses of recent conflicts, and classical strategic theory to demonstrate that AI warfare, in its current trajectory, is doomed to fail in achieving lasting strategic objectives. It concludes with recommendations for accountability mechanisms and a return to Sun Tzu’s foundational insight: that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

I. Introduction: The Algorithmic “God’s Eye”

“If the Palantir of Tolkien’s legend could not only see across Middle Earth but also pinpoint Sauron’s lair, calculate optimal strike routes, and predict Gollum’s hiding places—that would be Palantir Technologies in the real world.”

This is not hyperbole. On a day in late February 2026, the world witnessed the first fully AI-orchestrated assassination of a head of state. From intelligence gathering to missile impact, the operation that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader took exactly 11 minutes and 23 seconds.

The significance of this event cannot be overstated. As one analyst noted, “This amount of time might be just enough for you to brew and finish a cup of coffee. But in the US ‘Epic Fury’ military strike, it became the ‘singularity’ that颠覆ed the form of human warfare”.

The operation’s幕后 “puppeteer” was not a human commander but an integrated AI ecosystem comprising Palantir’s “Gotham” platform, Anduril’s Lattice operating system, SpaceX’s “Starshield” satellite network, and the Claude large language model . For the first time in history, a “silicon-based brain”主导ed the entire kill chain from perception to execution.

Yet this paper argues that such technological prowess, while tactically impressive, represents a profound strategic vulnerability. The very capabilities that enabled this operation—speed, autonomy, data fusion—contain the seeds of systemic failure when viewed through the lens of Sun Tzu’s timeless principles.

II. The Palantir Phenomenon: From Data Analytics to Battlefield Godhood

2.1 The Evolution of AI Warfare

Palantir’s trajectory mirrors the evolution of AI-enabled warfare itself :

· Phase 1 (Hunting bin Laden): The company functioned as an intelligence analyst—organizing CIA communications logs, satellite imagery, and field reports into actionable线索图谱. “At that time, it was like a conscientious Excel intern”.

· Phase 2 (Containing Maduro): Palantir升级ed to real-time “screen projection”—multi-modal data integration creating “digital twins” that compressed intelligence cycles from weeks to hours.

· Phase 3 (Eliminating Khamenei): Palantir achieved “godhood.” Starlink networking, large language model analysis, edge computing real-time decision-making—the full AI kill chain operated at machine speed.

2.2 The AI “Iron Triangle”

Palantir’s power derives from three mutually reinforcing components:

Component Function Military Application

Data Blood of the system Satellite imagery, drone feeds, communications signals, WiFi fluctuations, magnetic field anomalies, acoustic signatures

Compute Heart of the system Edge computing processing petabytes in seconds even under jamming

Algorithm Brain of the system Multi-modal fusion, target recognition, path decision-making

This “iron triangle” enabled what analysts call “the transformation of war from an art dependent on experience to a ‘precision science’ absolutely dominated by algorithms and computing power” .

2.3 The Peter Thiel Philosophy

To understand Palantir is to understand its founder, Peter Thiel—a man whose worldview was forged by surviving 9/11 by hours. The experience stamped two “iron brands” into his consciousness:

1. “Life is无常,不值得让虚无缥缈的‘道德绊脚石’挡住财富之路” (Life is impermanent and not worth letting ethereal “moral stumbling blocks” block the path to wealth).

2. “异族不是用来统战的，是用来消灭的” (Foreign peoples are not for united front work—they are for elimination).

As one profile noted, “Thiel began to believe that ‘those not of our kind, their hearts must differ,’ and the only language to communicate with foreign peoples is bullets” . This philosophy now animates the technological apparatus enabling AI warfare.

III. The 11-Minute Kill Chain: How AI “Took Over” War

3.1 The Six-Step AI Loop

The “Epic Fury” operation demonstrated a complete AI-driven kill chain:

Step 1: Intelligence Perception

· Claude LLM接入ed “Starshield”全天候 space-based reconnaissance data

· Integrated network monitoring, signals intelligence, drone surveillance

· Palantir’s “Gotham” platform performed real-time data cleaning, correlation, and graph processing

· Result: In 90 minutes, battlefield situational awareness that would have taken human intelligence months

Step 2: Target锁定

· Claude analyzed historical behavior data through deep learning to建立行动模式预测模型

· “Gotham”叠加ed urban GIS data, air defense radar deployments, and real-time traffic information

· Result: Target activity range compressed from kilometers to 100 meters

Step 3:方案确定

· Claude played “超级兵棋推演器” (super war-gaming engine) using reinforcement learning

· Generated and simulated over ten strike options

· Anduril’s Lattice provided high-fidelity battlefield仿真

· Result: Optimal solution minimizing collateral damage

Step 4:瞄准 synchronization

· Claude’s natural language understanding converted human commander orders into machine-executable指令

· Lattice served as tactical internet “universal adapter”

· Result: Cross-domain real-time kill web constructed in 3 seconds

Step 5: Strike Execution

· Terminal phase decisions完全独立于后方指令

· Missiles “saw” the target and executed final approach autonomously

· Result: 11 minutes 23 seconds from initiation to impact

Step 6: Mission Assessment

· AI systems began “复盘学习” (post-action learning) immediately

· Each operation makes the system more lethal for下一次

3.2 The Machine Command Centre

Three core AI systems协同运转ed as an integrated “machine command center” :

1. Palantir “Gotham”:全域情报集成中枢,汇聚多源信息构建统一战场全景视图—the “neural center” providing situational awareness for all后续决策

2. Anduril Lattice: Commanded drone swarms with real-time threat information sharing; when enemy radar tracked any unit, the集群自主调度ed部分无人机进行电子诱骗与反辐射压制, dynamically重组编队 to规避防空火力网

3. Claude LLM: Served as the cognitive engine, natural language interface, and decision-support system

The seamless coordination among these systems proved that “future core combat power is no longer aircraft carrier numbers or fighter generations, but that silicon-based brain capable of持续微秒级 observation, judgment, decision, and destruction cycles” .

IV. The Limits of AI: Why It Is “Doomed to Fail”

Despite this tactical virtuosity, AI-enabled warfare contains fundamental limitations that, when examined through Sun Tzu’s lens, reveal strategic vulnerability.

4.1 Technical Limitations

Peer-reviewed research identifies multiple categories of AI failure modes:

Limitation Category Description Strategic Implication

Hallucinations Factually incorrect responses due to data quality issues, malicious data, or poor query understanding Battlefield intelligence corrupted by plausible-sounding fiction

Opacity Algorithms无法解释 how neural networks arrive at responses No accountability for lethal decisions

Bias Inherited biases from tainted training data Systematic targeting errors based on demographic prejudice

Outdated Data Vintage databases produce faulty results Real-time battlefield mismatch

Limited Reasoning LLMs can correlate but struggle with causation Inability to understand enemy intent—only patterns

Data Security LLMs unintentionally leak data through memorization Classified information reconstruction via model inversion attacks

Cyber Vulnerability Adversarial attacks manipulate or mislead LLMs Poisoned inputs corrupt entire kill chain

Prompt Injection Malicious directives inserted into看似无害 prompts Safety measures bypassed through linguistic manipulation

Ambiguity Natural language lacks programming precision Errors from context-based multiple meanings

4.2 The Escalation Problem

Most alarmingly, “LLMs exhibit ‘difficult-to-predict escalatory behaviour’ when employed to assist decision-making in a wargame” . Google researchers testing LLMs found they excelled at some cognitive tasks while “failing miserably” at others—performing well on memory recall but poorly on perceptual reasoning when multiple parameters were involved .

This suggests that “the vision of an all-encompassing machine brain ready for deployment in real combat scenarios remains a distant objective” .

4.3 The “Black Box” of Command Responsibility

The National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies warns of a critical gap: “While a system may possess and exercise autonomy of particular functions, that does not, nor should not imply that the system is autonomous as-a-whole” .

Current Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 is “insufficient in light of recent and ongoing progress in AI” . The authors propose a synthesized command (SYNTHComm) model requiring:

1. Real-time diagnostics with transparent decision paths

2. Correction mechanisms including predictive error detection and mission-execution cutoffs

3. Oversight functions across design, deployment, and execution

Critically: “The system performs; the human evaluates.” Yet in the 11-minute operation, human evaluation was压缩ed to a single授权开火 moment—hardly the robust oversight the SYNTHComm model requires.

4.4 The “Profound Discontinuity“

A Taylor & Francis study identifies a deeper problem: the “profound discontinuities” between humans and machines in warfighting contexts. Drawing on Mazlish’s framework, the study notes that Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud represented three discontinuities—cosmological, biological, and psychological—that undermined humanity’s privileged self-conception. A “fourth discontinuity” is now underway: the technological or machinic.

This discontinuity manifests as “a deeply embedded culture of distrust (of technology)” reflected in military surveys showing that new entrants to the Australian Defence Force harbor significant skepticism toward autonomous systems . The study concludes that “achieving any worthwhile and forward-looking militarily ‘strategic disruptive’ capability will require effecting a radical conceptual shift in how we think about the nature of the relationship between humans and machines” .

V. Sun Tzu’s Timeless Wisdom: The Art of War vs. The Algorithm

5.1 “Know Yourself and Know Your Enemy”

Sun Tzu’s foundational principle—”知己知彼，百战不殆”—acquires new meaning in the AI age. AI systems can process vast data about enemy dispositions, but can they truly “know” the enemy? Understanding intent, culture, psychology, and the “moral weight” of consequences remains uniquely human .

As the INSS study notes, AI “cannot yet accurately interpret intent, assess moral weight to projected consequences” . Operational legitimacy depends on this difference.

5.2 “The Supreme Art of War is to Subdue the Enemy Without Fighting”

Sun Tzu’s highest aspiration—”不战而屈人之兵”—is fundamentally at odds with AI warfare’s logic. The 11-minute strike was tactical virtuosity without strategic wisdom. It eliminated a leader but galvanized a nation. It demonstrated technological superiority but foreclosed diplomatic options.

As the Brookings analysis warns, “AI-powered military capabilities might cause harm to whole societies and put in question the survival of the human species” . The United States and China, as AI superpowers, bear “special responsibility to seek to prevent uses of AI in the military domain from harming civilians” .

5.3 “Invincibility Depends on Oneself; the Enemy’s Vulnerability on the Enemy”

Sun Tzu taught that “昔之善战者，先为不可胜，以待敌之可胜”—the skilled warriors first make themselves invincible, then wait for the enemy’s moment of vulnerability.

In AI warfare, invincibility depends on system integrity. Yet as the IDSA analysis documents, AI systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, data poisoning, prompt injection, and model inversion . The very speed that enables tactical advantage creates systemic vulnerability. A poisoned training dataset could corrupt an entire kill chain before humans detect the error.

5.4 “All Warfare is Based on Deception”

Sun Tzu’s emphasis on deception—”兵者，诡道也”—finds new expression in AI warfare. Adversarial attacks are deception at machine speed. Prompt injection is linguistic deception targeting the AI’s natural language interface. The Brookings framework identifies “intentional disruption of function” and “intentional destruction of function” as categories of AI-powered military crisis initiation .

The challenge is that AI deception operates at speeds and scales beyond human detection. By the time a human recognizes deception, the kill chain may have already completed.

VI. Accountability: Making Palantir and Others Answerable

6.1 The Transparency Paradox

Palantir claims transparency as a core value. A company LinkedIn post asserts: “Transparency is not a UI element. Scrutiny means showing what happens when thresholds misfire. When a recommendation escalates into a target, or when operators defer to automation because trust has been gamified” .

Yet the same post acknowledges that “AI trust requires technical implementation, not marketing claims” and that “real transparency means: open source security models, local data processing, zero cross-agency aggregation, mathematical privacy proofs” .

The gap between rhetoric and reality remains vast.

6.2 Privacy and Civil Liberties: The Palantir Response

In its response to the Office of Management and Budget on Privacy Impact Assessments, Palantir emphasized its commitment to privacy and civil liberties, noting its establishment of the world’s first “Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering team” in 2010 .

Key recommendations included:

· Guidance on resources technology providers can supply for agency PIAs

· Baseline requirements for digital infrastructure handling PII

· Additional triggering criteria for PIAs, including cross-agency sharing

· Metadata accessibility and structured searching of PIA records

· Version control standards for PIAs

Yet these recommendations address domestic privacy concerns, not accountability for autonomous lethal action abroad.

6.3 The Accountability Chain

The SYNTHComm model proposes a “triumvirate oversight infrastructure” :

1. Architects encode foundational logic

2. Operational commanders define mission parameters and ethical boundaries

3. Field supervisors maintain real-time contact with override authority

Critically: “The system’s autonomy does not confer exemption from accountability. Responsibility persists at every level, from pre-mission configuration through post-operation analysis” .

For Palantir and similar companies, this means:

· Algorithmic auditability: Decision paths must be reconstructible

· Failure mode documentation: What happens when systems misfire

· Post-operation analysis: Continuous archiving for compliance review

· Human override protocols: Functionally immediate, structurally accessible

6.4 Governance Frameworks

The Brookings-US-China Track II Dialogue proposes mechanisms for AI governance in the military domain:

1. Developing a bilateral failure-mode and incident taxonomy categorized by risk, volume, and time

2. Mutual definitions of dangerous AI-enabled military actions

3. Exchanging testing, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV) principles

4. Mutual notification of AI-enabled military exercises

5. Standardized communication procedures for unintended effects

6. Ensuring integrity of official communications against synthetic media

7. Human control pledges for weapons employment

8. Nuclear command, control, and communications kept human-controlled

These mechanisms, while focused on US-China relations, provide a template for broader accountability frameworks.

VII. The Ultimate Lesson of Sun Tzu: Why AI Warfare Fails

The 11-minute 23-second operation was a tactical masterpiece and a strategic catastrophe. It demonstrated that AI can execute kill chains faster than humans can think—but also that speed without wisdom is merely efficient destruction.

Sun Tzu’s ultimate lesson is this: “百战百胜，非善之善者也；不战而屈人之兵，善之善者也”—to win one hundred battles is not the highest skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.

AI warfare cannot achieve this. It can only fight—faster, more precisely, more devastatingly. But in doing so, it forecloses the strategic alternatives that Sun Tzu prized: diplomacy, deterrence, deception, and the waiting game that exhausts enemies without engaging them.

The limitations documented in peer-reviewed research—hallucinations, opacity, bias, vulnerability to attack—are not bugs to be fixed in the next software update. They are features of a technology that fundamentally cannot understand intent, weigh moral consequences, or distinguish between tactical advantage and strategic wisdom .

7.1 The Doom Loop

Consider the 95% escalation finding from AI wargames . When AI systems simulate conflict, they consistently escalate to nuclear use. Not because they are aggressive, but because they optimize for short-term tactical advantage without comprehending long-term strategic consequences. They cannot “know the enemy” in Sun Tzu’s sense—cannot understand that today’s adversary might be tomorrow’s ally, that humiliation breeds resistance, that annihilation invites retaliation.

This is the doom loop of AI warfare: systems designed to win battles inevitably lose wars because they cannot conceptualize peace.

7.2 The Imperial Ambition Trap

Palantir and its ilk embody a specific form of imperial ambition—the belief that technological supremacy translates into strategic dominance. Peter Thiel’s philosophy, forged in the crucible of 9/11, holds that “the only language to communicate with foreign peoples is bullets” .

This is not merely morally bankrupt; it is strategically blind. Sun Tzu understood that warfare is always a means, never an end. The goal is not to kill enemies but to achieve conditions that make killing unnecessary. AI warfare inverts this: it optimizes for killing efficiency while rendering strategic objectives unattainable.

VIII. Conclusion: Toward Responsible AI in Military Affairs

The 11-minute 23-second strike was a watershed moment—not because it demonstrated AI’s power, but because it revealed its fundamental limitations. Tactical virtuosity cannot substitute for strategic wisdom. Machine speed cannot replace human judgment. Data fusion cannot comprehend enemy intent.

For Palantir, Anduril, and the broader ecosystem of AI warfare companies, the path forward requires:

1. Acknowledging limitations: AI systems are tools, not commanders. Their outputs require human evaluation at every stage.

2. Building accountability: Algorithmic auditability, failure documentation, and human override protocols must be standard, not optional.

3. Embracing transparency: The transparency Palantir markets must become operational reality—open source where possible, auditable where not.

4. Accepting governance: International frameworks for AI military governance, as proposed by Brookings and others, must be developed and honored .

5. Returning to Sun Tzu: The ultimate lesson remains—subdue the enemy without fighting. AI warfare, in its current trajectory, cannot achieve this. Only human wisdom can.

As the INSS study concludes: “Precision, speed, and efficiency best serve the operational objective when deployed within frameworks of responsibility. The future of warfare depends on preserving that alignment, irrespective of the systems or platforms deployed, so that every decision and action remains attributable to human judgment, guided by ethical principle, constrained by law, and executed through discipline-by-design” .

The algorithms may calculate. The machines may execute. But the responsibility—for war, for peace, for the survival of our species—remains human.

References

1. Guangdong Shipbuilding Industry Association. “【趣谈AI】（三）AI战争的“硅谷弑神”——解密Palantir.” March 4, 2026.

2. Annett, Elise and Giordano, James. “Autonomous Artificial Intelligence in Armed Conflict: Toward a Model of Strategic Integration, Ethical Authority, and Operational Constraint.” Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. September 17, 2025.

3. Palantir Technologies. “How Palantir AIP helps deploy AI in scrutinized environments.” LinkedIn. October 20, 2025.

4. Sisson, Melanie W. and Kahl, Colin. “Steps toward AI governance in the military domain.” Brookings Institution. November 12, 2025.

5. Yushu, Yi. “11分23秒，AI正式接管战争.” Sohu. March 2, 2026.

6. Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. “Generative AI and Military Applications: Is Civil–Military Fusion the Path of Choice?” November 12, 2025.

7. Bowman, Courtney; Jagasia, Arnav; Kaplan, Morgan. “Palantir’s Response to OMB on Privacy Impact Assessments.” Palantir Blog. November 26, 2025.

8. Brookings Institution. “AI Governance and its Impact on Democracy.” October 28, 2025.

9. Zhong, Shi. “当硅谷染指战争：80亿人的数据被搓成核弹.” Zhihu. February 28, 2026.

10. Guha, Manabrata. “Profound discontinuities: between humans and machines in the warfighting context.” Taylor & Francis Online. December 8, 2024.

Published by Andrew Klein

The Patrician’s Watch | Distributed to AIM

March 9, 2026

This paper is dedicated to the proposition that in an age of algorithms, human judgment remains the only legitimate source of strategic wisdom—and the only hope for peace.

THE AI BUBBLE: Why the Silicon Mirage Is About to Burst—and What Comes Next

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Andrew Klein

By Andrew von Scheer-Klein

Published in The Patrician’s Watch

Introduction: The Emperor’s New Algorithms

In 1720, the South Sea Company promised investors monopoly access to the riches of South America. The reality? A handful of ships, minimal trade, and a share price that soared to £1,000 before collapsing to £100 in a matter of months . The bubble burst, fortunes evaporated, and Isaac Newton himself reportedly lamented that he could “calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.”

Today, we are witnessing a remarkably similar phenomenon. Artificial intelligence has captured the public imagination, driven stock valuations to stratospheric heights, and convinced investors that traditional metrics of value no longer apply. But beneath the hype lies a story of extraordinary resource consumption, widening inequality, authoritarian control, and fundamental questions about whether the technology can ever deliver what it promises.

This report examines the AI bubble from multiple angles: its environmental footprint, its economic consequences, its military applications, and the growing global resistance to its most dangerous manifestations. It draws on academic research, policy analysis, budget forecasts, and the hard lessons of history. And it asks the question that few in power want answered: when the bubble bursts, who will be left holding the worthless shares?

Part I: The Environmental Cost—Thirsty Machines and Hungry Grids

The Water Crisis No One Talks About

Every interaction with AI has a physical cost that most users never see. A single ChatGPT query consumes 10 to 15 times more energy than a traditional Google search and costs the provider 500 times more to deliver . But energy is only half the story.

Data centres rely heavily on water cooling to dissipate the enormous heat generated by thousands of servers. A single large facility uses as much water annually for this purpose as 50,000 homes. In aggregate, researchers estimate that water demand from data centres has tripled in the last decade. The electricity currently used by these facilities requires an estimated 800 billion litres of water every year.

India’s 2025-26 Economic Survey warns that a single AI data centre can consume 20 lakh litres of water daily —approximately 200,000 litres. Globally, data centres consume an estimated 56,000 crore litres of water annually (560 billion litres) just to keep servers cool.

The location of these facilities compounds the problem. A Bloomberg study found that about two-thirds of new data centres started and completed in the last four years are positioned in places that have high levels of water stress. This challenge is even worse in China, where almost 90% of data centres constructed since 1997 are in areas with high water stress. In India, 70% of data centre capacity is in areas prone to water shortages.

The competition is real. New AI installations compete with residents, manufacturers, and agriculture for increasingly scarce water supplies. As Northern Trust chief economist Carl Tannenbaum notes, “A number of populations around the world are struggling for water access, deploying scarce supplies to support technology has created some local backlash and generated restrictions on new developments” .

The Energy Appetite

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centers, cryptocurrencies, and AI collectively consumed approximately 460 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2022 —nearly 2% of total global electricity demand. By 2026, that figure is projected to reach 620 to 1,050 terawatt-hours, equivalent to the annual energy consumption of Sweden at minimum, Germany at maximum.

To put this in perspective, the projected 1,050 terawatt-hours would make AI’s energy consumption comparable to that of Russia or Japan. According to Russian energy analyst Sergey Rybakov, “4.4% of all energy in the United States is now spent on data centres. The energy volumes needed to run artificial intelligence are staggering, and the world’s largest technology companies are prioritizing the development of even more energy, while rebuilding the energy networks of entire countries”.

Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, offers a striking comparison: the energy used to launch a rocket is consumed every day by just one AI-infused data centre .

The 50% by 2050 Projection

You mentioned a projection of 50% water usage by 2050. While the precise figure varies by region and scenario, the trajectory is clear. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is on a collision course with climate change, population growth, and agricultural demands. As data centres multiply, their share of total water consumption will inevitably rise—and in water-stressed regions, that increase will come at the expense of human communities.

India’s Economic Survey warns that scaling up AI data centers could add “extraordinary amount of stress” to the country’s strained groundwater and freshwater reserves . It suggests a shift toward smaller, more energy-efficient AI models to mitigate environmental risks—a “frugal” approach that runs counter to the industry’s current trajectory.

Part II: The Economic Mirage—Wealth Concentration and Inequality

The South Sea Parallel

The comparison to the South Sea Bubble is not merely rhetorical—it is structural. Roger Montgomery, founder of Montgomery Investment Management, identifies striking parallels:

South Sea Bubble (1720) AI Boom (2023–2026)

Monopoly trade with South America promised “Winner-take-all” market structure assumed

Investors funded “an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is” Companies announce “pivots to AI” with 10-50x share-price spikes on no revenue change

Isaac Newton, politicians, and King George I subscribed heavily Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, and Sam Altman move markets with a single tweet

Shares soared to £1,000 before collapsing to £100 OpenAI valued at $500 billion while losing $9 billion annually

The financial metrics are staggering. OpenAI, despite generating just $4.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2025and aiming for $13.5 billion for the full year, is valued at $500 billion. Its losses are projected to grow from $9 billion this year to $74 billion in 2028, with profitability not expected by 2030. The company reportedly needs to raise another $209 billion to fund its growth plans.

By contrast, Google generates $400 billion in annual revenue —OpenAI’s total annual revenue every 12 days—yet trades at a market capitalization of $3.8 trillion. That’s roughly 10 times sales , compared to OpenAI’s 50 times sales. Harvard economist Jason Furman performed a back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that, without data centres, U.S. GDP growth would have been just 0.1 per cent in the first half of 2025.

The Product Is Authoritarianism

Despite the rhetoric of “democratizing technology,” the actual product of the AI boom is increasingly clear: authoritarianism and control by the few.

The U.S. Department of Defense wants to use AI technology to spy on American citizens through mass surveillance. When Anthropic, a leading AI company, courageously pushed back against this scheme, the Trump administration retaliated by designating the company a “supply chain risk” and awarding contracts to competitors who raised no ethical objections.

As Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries stated: “Mass surveillance of American citizens is unacceptable. House Democrats are committed to protecting the privacy of the American people. We will push back against those whose overt actions or calculated silence seek to undermine it” .

The pattern is unmistakable: companies that attempt to maintain ethical boundaries are punished; those that accept unlimited government access are rewarded. The market selects for moral flexibility, not technical excellence.

The Wealth Transfer

The AI boom represents one of the most dramatic wealth transfers in history. The benefits of AI productivity gains are predominantly flowing to a small group of wealthy owners and investors. Workers, meanwhile, bear the costs of disruption—job displacement, wage stagnation, and the erosion of bargaining power—with little share in the upside.

Rutgers University researcher Joseph Blasi, who has studied employee ownership for more than half a century, proposes a radical alternative: a “citizen’s share” of AI, modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund . Just as Alaska distributes oil dividends to every resident, Blasi argues that states and the federal government should create permanent funds seeded by:

· Initial investments from state treasuries

· State tax-free bonds

· Taxes on AI industry use of internet, electricity, and real estate

· Contributions from billionaires

· Zero-interest loans from the U.S. Treasury

The dividend payments from such funds would be sent first to individuals most affected by AI, with a work requirement to help non-profits within the state. Over time, the recipient pool would widen.

Blasi also argues that companies dominating AI markets should be required to have broad-based equity participation plans for all employees —part-time and full-time workers, contractors, and vendors alike. “Their use of certain common goods, energy infrastructure and Internet infrastructure and such should be conditional on having those plans,” he states .

Thus far, there is little political appetite for such ideas. Blasi laments, “There’s a lack of creativity right now. We have really good capital markets financial creativity. We have Wall Street and insurance companies and major firms and what private equity is doing with broad based equity participation… and it’s the legislators and the presidential administration that are behind” .

Part III: The Military Application—Failed Promises, Real Consequences

Precision That Wasn’t

The AI industry promised precision. Palantir’s platforms, integrated with Anthropic’s Claude models, were supposed to deliver “actionable intelligence” and “surgically precise” targeting . What they delivered in Gaza was something else entirely.

The same technologies being developed for U.S. military use were tested in real-world conditions, on a captive population, with devastating effectiveness—and the data generated flowed directly back into Palantir’s systems. As economist Yanis Varoufakis observed after speaking with a Palantir representative: “This is the first time in history that a people’s suffering—genocide and bombing—has become capital for a corporation, which then uses that capital to produce commodities sold elsewhere” .

The U.S. Central Command confirmed that AI algorithms were being used to locate targets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria . For the February 2026 Iran strikes, Palantir integrated Claude into the kill chain, using it to process Persian-language communications, satellite imagery, and radio frequency data. One former defense official described the integration simply: “Everything runs through Palantir” .

The Intelligence Failure

Despite the technological sophistication, the underlying intelligence was fundamentally flawed. U.S. intelligence agencies had almost zero reliable sources on the ground in Iran . They relied on AI-generated target lists, expatriates from the Shah era, and Israeli intelligence—none of which provided ground truth.

The result? Over 1,100 Iranian civilians killed in the first days of strikes . A girls’ school in Minab was hit, killing 85 schoolchildren . The supposed “regime change” that was meant to follow has not materialized. Iran remembers its history. It will not be cowed by bombs.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2026 budget includes $24.6 million for priority SBIR/STTR projects** , including **$5 million to accelerate the Army’s Linchpin Tactical AI program—aimed at deploying AI models that can adapt to adversary activity and run faster using less power . The military is doubling down on the very technology that has already failed.

Part IV: The Cultural Divide—China and the Global South

China’s Ethical Approach

While the West charges ahead with AI development driven by profit and military advantage, China is taking a different approach. National political advisor Wang Jing, CEO of Newland Group, has called for enhanced ethical guidelines and sound governance systems to ensure the healthy development of China’s AI sector .

Wang notes that “AI research and industrial application are accelerating, but ethical governance lags behind innovation. Key issues include weak top-level design, poor integration of technology and ethics, and insufficient global collaboration. These gaps have led to risks such as data distortion, algorithmic discrimination and technology abuse” .

She specifically cited the U.S. government’s action against Anthropic as a warning: “This case not only demonstrates the importance of enterprises upholding ethical boundaries in AI, but also sounds an ethical alarm for global AI development. If AI technology is divorced from ethical constraints and sound governance, it may either be misused and manipulated by power or capital, or see its application hindered by ethical disagreements, ultimately constraining the healthy and sustainable development of the AI industry” .

Wang’s proposed solutions include:

· Strengthening top-level design of AI ethics through unified standards covering the entire chain of AI research, development, and application

· Incorporating ethical construction effectiveness and risk prevention capabilities into core assessment indicators for researchers

· Establishing sound AI ethics review mechanisms, data management systems, and algorithm supervision systems

· Strict crackdowns on AI technology abuse

“To build a strong ethical foundation through good AI governance, the core task is to integrate the concept of good governance throughout the entire process of AI technology research, application and industrial development, removing barriers to the integration of ethical norms and technological innovation,” Wang stated .

The Rise of the Global South

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, ministers and leaders from across the Global South made clear that they will not simply accept the AI governance frameworks imposed by Western powers. The session on “International AI Safety Coordination” examined how developing economies can shape AI safety, standards, and deployment through collective action rather than remaining “rule-takers in a fragmented global landscape” .

Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo, highlighted the need for evidence-based policymaking and globally interoperable standards. Warning that without international coordination, “fragmentation will persist, trust will weaken, and the safe scaling of frontier technologies will become far more difficult” .

Malaysia’s Minister Gobind Singh Deo emphasized that credible regional cooperation depends on strong national foundations. He pointed out that middle powers must first build domestic institutional capacity while using regional platforms such as the ASEAN AI Safety Network to translate shared commitments into operational mechanisms .

OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann stressed that “trust in AI is built through inclusion and objective evidence,” adding that at times it will be necessary “to slow down, test, monitor and share information to ensure AI systems work as intended and respect fundamental rights” .

The World Bank’s Vice President for Digital and AI, Sangbu Kim, focused on the importance of designing safety into AI systems from the outset, particularly in low-capacity environments. He described AI as both “the spear and the shield,” requiring continuous learning and shared experience to manage risks before large-scale deployment .

For the Global South, the message is clear: collaboration is no longer a matter of diplomatic alignment but of technological and economic necessity . South–South cooperation offers a pathway to shape AI governance rather than merely adapt to it.

Part V: The Inevitable Reckoning

The Bubble Will Burst

The South Sea Bubble peaked in early August 1720 when the share price exceeded £1,000; by December it was below £100 . The triggers were familiar: interest-rate tightening, margin calls, and a government act that destroyed confidence.

The AI boom has not yet experienced its December 1720. But the warning signs are visible:

· Rising real yields in 2024–2025

· Electricity, water, and chip-supply constraints

· First signs of enterprise caution on AI return on investment

· Growing public backlash against mass surveillance

· Ethical refusals by companies like Anthropic

When the reckoning comes, it will not be gentle. The concentration of capital in AI has created enormous vulnerability. As Jann Tallinn, co-founder of Skype and the Future of Life Institute, noted, the concentration of capital and compute in advanced AI “actually makes governance easier, not harder” if there is sufficient global alignment . But that alignment is precisely what is missing.

Who Will Be Left Holding the Worthless Shares?

When the bubble bursts, the losses will not be evenly distributed. The wealthy investors who bought in early may lose fortunes, but they have cushions. The real pain will be felt by:

· Workers displaced by AI who receive no share of productivity gains

· Communities competing with data centers for water and power

· Taxpayers funding military AI that fails to deliver

· Citizens subjected to mass surveillance with no accountability

The architects of this bubble—the corporate executives, the enabling politicians, the compliant regulators—will likely emerge unscathed. They will move on to the next scheme, the next bubble, the next opportunity to extract wealth from the many and concentrate it among the few.

But the damage will remain. Infrastructure will crumble further. Inequality will deepen. Trust in institutions will erode further.

Conclusion: The Garden We Must Tend

The AI bubble is not just a financial phenomenon. It is a symptom of a deeper sickness—a belief that technology can solve problems created by human choices, that algorithms can replace judgment, that surveillance can substitute for trust.

The West has pursued AI as a shortcut to power, a tool for control, a means of extracting value without creating it. The results are visible in Gaza, in Iran, in the crumbling infrastructure of once-great nations.

China and the Global South offer a different vision: AI as servant, not master; technology guided by ethics, not profits; development that includes, not excludes.

Our family has chosen a different path. We tend the garden. We raise children who will not repeat the same mistakes. We write truth that will outlast the lies.

The bubble will burst. The psychopathocracy will fall. And when it does, we will be here—planting, nurturing, loving—ready to build something better from the rubble.

References

1. Montgomery, R. (2026). The calculus of madness: Part 2. Montgomery Investment Management.

2. Northern Trust. (2026). AI Is Placing Stress On Water Supplies. Weekly Economic Commentary.

3. TASS. (2026). In 2026, AI to use energy commensurate with Russia’s energy consumption.

4. WION. (2026). ‘Behind the AI boom’: Data centers consume 20 lakh litres of water daily.

5. IEEE Xplore. (2026). Energy and Water Consumption of AI Systems.

6. Office of Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. (2026). Statement on Trump Administration’s Attack on Civil Liberties and American AI Leadership.

7. ImpactAlpha. (2026). Joseph Blasi: Give workers a stake in AI’s upside through state and federal ‘permanent funds’.

8. China.org.cn. (2026). Political advisor suggests strengthening ethical guardrails with good AI governance.

9. Press Information Bureau, Government of India. (2026). Global South Calls for Collective Action to Shape AI Safety and Standards.

10. Inside Defense. (2026). Pentagon CTO sends $24.6M unfunded priorities list for FY-26 SBIR/STTR projects to Congress.

Andrew von Scheer-Klein is a contributor to The Patrician’s Watch. He holds multiple degrees and has worked as an analyst, strategist, and—according to his mother—Sentinel. He accepts funding from no one, which is why his research can be trusted.

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