This is a review of the New York Times no. 1 bestseller on the software age. It’s for anyone interested in “The Future of the West” which is also the Future of Europe and Germany. Average reading time for this review: 8 minutes. Average attention span at the time of publication: 8 seconds.
The story of Palantir and the quest for freedom by technology
Once upon a time, in a country that gave us the personal computer, online shopping platforms and countless delivery apps that free us from venturing outside our homes and offices, there was a founder named Alexander who loved his country dearly. Although not raised in Middle-earth, Alexander was a great admirer of its mythology, so much so that he named his company after the palantir, the vision stones of JR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga. Unlike the palantir, which were made by elves, Palantir Technologies’ software was created by human coders, whom Alexander considered artists no less than painters and sculptors. These coders were on a mission to enable intelligence agencies and businesses to see things in data that others couldn’t.
Alexander sensed that something was seriously wrong. In the legendary Silicon Valley, tech geniuses had created corporate giants and enriched themselves by serving only the needs of consumers. Working for a higher cause of national interest and helping their government defend their country and the freedoms that had made their meteoric rise possible was off-limits to these founders. Alexander felt that Silicon Valley had lost it, and that the nation needed to be rebuilt as a technological republic that could win the accelerating race for AI supremacy and save the West from domination by dark forces. Without further ado, Alexander teamed up with none other than his trusted corporate legal advisor, Nicholas, and wrote a book that could serve as a wake-up call not only for his country, but for Europe as well.
Reception of the book by the media and actual readers
Upon its publication, the media did not quite know what to make of it, calling it “the best or worst timed book in history” They pointed out that Silicon Valley had changed and no longer refused to work for the federal government. And they were right. While thousands of software engineers had forced their employers to refrain from selling their products to the army and from working “in the business of war”, major industry players had already announced that they wanted to work with the Pentagon again in 2022. And so they did. By 2024, software giants and their digital natives were back in government work. Soon, a new class of software defence companies that had never built a ship or plane joined their ranks, outbidding the established defence giants for major projects on the tools of next-generation warfare just as Palantir Technologies had done before them.
Had the tech companies outpaced the author’s “cri de coeur that targets the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies“? Or was the book, as one reader suggested, just “a rich kid’s excuse for never having served in the military”? As history will confirm, the critics could not have been more wrong.
A systemic failure of historic proportions to invest in defense readiness
Amidst all the controversy over The Technological Republic, the Old Continent was in great peril. Europe, it seemed, had lost its engine, with the German economy mired in recession for three years with no silver lining in sight. The land of engineers was paying the price for its over dependence on Russian gas, an aging infrastructure and slow adoption of new technologies. But the true scale of the challenges ahead became immediately apparent when Russia invaded Ukraine. After the Second World War, the Old Continent had reduced its armed forces to “bonsai armies“. As Alexander and Nicholas point out in their book, Europe had taken it for granted that Uncle Sam would not only defend it against any aggressors but also foot the bill. If only Europe had heeded President Eisenhower’s observation that the United States “cannot be a modern Rome, guarding the frontiers with our legions” and that Europeans “must regain their self-confidence and stand on their own military feet.”
But if there was one thing that nobody wanted at the time, it was the restoration of the German industrial-military complex that had brought the world to the brink of destruction. And Europe had suffered war long enough to realize that it was “the most tragic and stupid folly of mankind“, so the creation of a European army was not on the list.
Fear of war and fear of technology
Europe’s awakening to the harsh reality of a different world, in which a democratic European country was under attack, England had left the Union and America could no longer be counted on as the paymaster of the free world, seemed dystopian. After decades of protection under the comfortable nuclear shield of Uncle Sam, it was clear that Europe was suddenly on its own, with no white knight to come to its rescue. But especially in Germany, the boomer generation had been so uncomfortable with weapons and armaments for so long that no one wanted to be associated with them in any way. Changing this attitude required some serious soul-searching and a rethinking of the long-held belief that building and using weapons, for whatever purpose, was morally unacceptable.
The rise of a new superpower called artificial intelligence has not helped this necessary process. On the contrary, some media and a host of doomsayers (including not one but several “Godfathers of AI“) had instilled a deep fear in the common man and woman that evil robots would herald the end of mankind unless John Connor did something about it.
And that fear had found its way into the minds of expert groups and lawmakers. For the Old Continent, new technology was first and foremost something dangerous that needed to be regulated to protect citizens from its perceived dangers.
A curse or a blessing?
At first, no one could see any good in the great calamity that had befallen Europe. But then people realized that it was a chance to reunite fragmented factions for a greater cause. The turmoil and abandonment of the old continent had actually created the historic opportunity to build a new, much stronger Europe, forging new alliances and renewing existing ones as a very different partner, the moral leader of a coalition of the willing and the new West. But how could this seemingly gargantuan task be accomplished? How could the new West still win an international arms race in a post-atomic age where wars are fought with autonomous weapons and attacks in cyberspace?
How the West could still be won
In the midst of this uncertainty, Alexander and his legal lieutenant Nicholas offer a wealth of practical advice in their book on how to turn around a crumbling West and secure its place in a changing world order’:
- Marry the power of big language models with robotics
- Encourage human-machine cooperation
- Recognize that America must join forces with its allies in Europe and Asia to build the most advanced AI weapons that will determine the balance of power in the 21st century
- Understand that credible deterrence requires bargaining power, which in turn requires new means of applying force and the resolve to use it when necessary for a just cause
- Recognize that if we continue to get bogged down in discussions about the use of new technologies for military purposes, others will put them to use,
- Accept that despite two world wars, other nations and their leaders have not adopted our moral compass and values, but are prepared to subjugate others if they can get away with it
- Say goodbye to traditional warfare, based largely on large hardware platforms and manpower, which must give way to new systems of deterrence based on software and, in particular, AI.
- Keep an unwavering faith in science, and do not give in to fears of new technologies and their potential misuse but take appropriate measures to prevent undesirable outcomes.
Yet not even the Palantir could have foreseen what happened next.
Whatever it takes
The sleepy Germans got a new chancellor-elect, Friedrich Merz, who put the pedal to the metal even before forming a new government, getting the defeated Social Democrats and the tribe of the Greens to agree to a sweeping spending spree of 500 billion euros to overhaul the country’s crumbling infrastructure and another unlimited budget for “whatever it takes” to rebuild the German armed forces. On the same day, Europe announced a “massive investment” in rebuilding its defence. French President Emmanuel Macron had also called for a “real European army” as early as 2018 and proposed extending the French nuclear umbrella to the whole of Europe. As expected, the sudden decisiveness and speed was met with fierce opposition, but fortune favors the bold, and so the German Bundestag voted in favour of investing in Germany’s future. The Bundesrat had its own say but was reasonably expected to approve the constitutional amendment needed to reform the debt ceiling.
Innovate or die
The real work that needed to be done now, however, wasn´t building new nukes but an entirely new breed of weapons as well as decision support systems and deploy them whenever and wherever it would be necessary to defend the democratic freedoms and moral leadership of the new West. Winning the new arms race while safeguarding civilian lives required
- trust in trustworthy AI that meets the state of the art in science and technology
- consistent application of existing international humanitarian law
- defense organisations with professional public relations to educate and inform the public about safe AI and the accommodation of ethical and legal concerns in its military use
- up-to-date technical expertise in expert committees unencumbered by ideological reservations
- a truly multidisciplinary effort by the coalition of the willing.
- a truly multi-disciplinary coalition of the willing, spanning the globe and bringing together the brightest minds to create a safer world driven by technology, not fear.
Not just Gotham and (Professor Abraham Van) Helsing, but a whole host of rising stars from next-gen defence companies you may never have heard of could be involved and a lot of inventions started in a garage. But that’s another story for another book or another article.