I mean, I think we all recognize that these are gambling sites trying to skirt gambling regulations, so all of their arguments are going to seem ridiculous. “We’re a prediction market, and individuals with specialized knowledge improve our accuracy.” “We allow people to hedge against adverse events, like Elon Musk tweeting over 300 times this week.” “These are financial contracts, not wagers.”

The interviews I’ve seen with “prediction market” CEOs, they’re openly begging for people to trade on confidential, privileged, or classified information, because that’s the source of their markets’ supposed predictive power.

Most of us lived through 2020: saw cities shut down; hospitals using refrigerated trucks as morgues; literally millions of dead. Most of us then saw the vaccine roll out and all of that just went away.

Don’t even get me started on the 1990s. Every new processor generation actually felt faster. Web pages had blinking banners because the creator thought it looked cool, not to advertise a personal information vacuum. There was no better introduction to the public’s absolutely awful sense of style. But I went from talking to international friends for $0.50/minute to free, and it was amazing.

Those companies have extremely well developed propaganda machines. They have to sell their technology and products as benefits to governments (i.e. society) and solutions to chaos (i.e. crime and terrorism), and they have extremely well refined language to describe themselves in positive term. If you don’t look past the company line, it’s easy to believe that the skeptics and warnings are all just FUD from haters, especially when the propaganda pays your mortgage.

Then Palantir goes and publishes an actual fascist manifesto…

To me, that’s the ‘fancy search engine’ mode of AI where it works well and basically focuses the human effort. A needle-in-haystack problem. It might still be missing things, but they’re things you’ve already missed yourself, so no loss.

It’s different from asking Claude, for example, to create a new guest VLAN with limited internet access and access to only a specific service on the private network. For that, you have to 1) trust Claude because you lack the expertise to review, 2) spend time learning the config system well enough to review, or 3) already know the system well enough to check it. 1) just sounds bad. 2) sounds like Claude isn’t saving much time, but maybe helps focus the human where to study, and 3) seems like the human might have been able to just do the job in similar or less time than writing the prompt + reviewing the result.

I feel like the big mistake they continue to propagate is failing to distinguish among the uses of AI.

A lot of hype seems to be the generative uses, where AI creates code, images, text, or whatever, or the agentic uses where it supposedly automates some process. Safe uses in that way should involve human review and approval, and if the human spends as much time reviewing as they would creating it in the first place, then there’s a productivity loss.

All the positive cases I’ve heard of use AI like a fancy search engine - look for specific issues in a large code base, look for internal consistency in large document or document sets. That form lets the human shift from reading hundreds or thousands of pages to reading whatever snippets the AI returns. Even if that’s a lot of false positives, it’s still a big savings over full review. And as long as the AI’s false-negative rate is better than the human, it’s a net improvement in review.

And, of course, there’s the possibility that AI facilitated review allows companies to do review of documents that they would otherwise have ignored as intractable, which would also show up as reduced productivity.