There’s a tension in democracy between the citizens and their decision-making power in terms of the greater good, and those they elect to Congress who are directly responsible for the greater good of the nation. There’s a lot of room for discussion and honorable dissension in that tension.
Still, I jumped when I read this this quote from the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp. Palantir supplies software used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for managing the process of apprehension of undocumented persons in the United States. As noted here, a number of computer technology companies have run into problems when supplying competing software, as employees are uncomfortable with and may even refuse to work on such products.
But Palantir?
In an interview with Bloomberg News this week, Karp said the government should be responsible for answering difficult questions about how technologies may be used to surveil citizens.
“I do not believe that these questions should be decided in Silicon Valley by a number of engineers at large platform companies,” Karp said in the interview.
It’s interesting how one individual – or perhaps a small team of C-suiters – can make that decision, but a much larger number of engineers should not.
Think about that for a moment.
Of course, there are various caveats, such as foreign engineers not having a right to make that decision, and the engineers in question could simply leave their jobs for more morally agreeable jobs. In the latter case, though, I’d dryly observe that a corporation should really be a cooperative venture, and if large numbers of your employees are concerned that your business strategy has run over your moral standards, perhaps you should think about it.
But it really comes down to engineers who are members of a democracy being told to shut up and not have an opinion on a moral issue of the day. It’s one thing to have an opinion and express it forcefully, but to tell others that they should just sit down and work: I think that’s a problem.
