Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

I just read a content marketing piece that is the equivalent of the Gloria in a choral mass titled “Google’s New Deep Research and Deep Research Max Agents Can Search the Web and Your Private Data.” If you are not into choral masses, the Gloria is a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to God. An 18th century Gloria would have been joyful; the Gloria about I shall comment is smarmy. Once I present my reaction to “Google’s New Deep Research and Deep Research Max Agents Can Search the Web and Your Private Data.”

Here’s a dinobaby wondering what the heck is in his email after a 40 year work career. What business is it of Google’s to process these data. Forty years ago, information that was unclassified may be classified today. What’s the purpose of this? Palantir moved in HQ twice in a short time. California to Colorado, Colorado  to Florida. Can’t these people stick in one place and contribute to the community. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.

This essay is long one, and it blends an improvement in Google’s AI capabilities. That’s okay. The description strikes me as overwrought. What caused me to stand up and rage at the empty home office was the rhetoric and tone. Google’s agent can search the Web (or what’s left of it after paywalls, AI slop, and information weaponization). But the big news is that Google can and will process your files, cloud resources, data sets. With these data tucked into your profile on Mother Google, the kindergarten-color outfit will output a report with charts.

With a mindless repetition, this baroque content marketing write up presents the innovation as progress. Consultants, med tech professionals, or any knowledge worker has the Google and its AI standing at your side. The good news for Google is that the content resides on Mother Google’s servers. This is a feature for you. Trust Mother Google.

Google is normalizing its access to billions of users’ information. Google will do a much better job of presenting “your” information than you, a mere Google user and Google advertising consumer, could ever achieve. The essay blasts Gloria structure for Googzilla. Deep integration, broad personal information, and a hoped-for dependence on Mother Google. Google is just doing what is logical. What’s the problem?

Answer: I don’t trust BAIT (big AI tech) outfits. These firms do what they want, dismiss annoying regulators, pay lobbyists, and follow Mother Google’s vision of what is right, true, and fair.

I am annoyed because a few days ago, I spotted a weird X.com post. I also read “Palantir: Why Its Political Manifesto Is Causing a Stir.” Let me quote from the German publication DW.com:

Economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis shared the original post with the comment: “If Evil could tweet, this is what it would!”

What’s interesting is that these Palantirians have some of their fellow travelers in influential positions. How is that working out? From my point of view, it is working out for some Palantirians; for example, Palantir, an intelware vendor, is now protecting America’s foods. Hey, isn’t there supposed to be a government agency riding herd on beverages that feature lots of caffeine?

Here’s another statement from DW.com:

Dutch populism researcher Cas Mudde described Palantir’s thread as a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian United States and controlled by tech surveillance companies, labelling it “Technofascism pure!”  On LinkedIn, Mudde said its worldview disqualifies Palantir as a business partner. Europe should not only halt any new cooperation but “should divest from this technofascist company ASAP!”

When I consider the smarmy Google write up with the techno-militant attitude of Palantir, the issue becomes more serious than indexing emails.

Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2026

What this means is that they discovered Anthropic employees who used Claude, the firm’s chatbot, for at least six months had a higher success rate than those who didn’t. One implication of this statement is that the more one uses AI, the more skilled and dependent one becomes on AI. In some work situations, AI dependence is a good thing.

How will this change the job field? One leader at Anthropic said:

“In an interview with TechCrunch, Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, spoke about how the report does not yet prove a broader shift towards automated employment. ‘There’s no material difference in unemployment rates’ for those who use the company’s AI chatbot for the ‘most central task of their job in automated ways,’ McCrory said, pointing to professions like technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers rather than those who work in careers that need ‘physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.’”

In contrast, Dario Amodei the Anthropic CEO said that AI could delete entry level white collar jobs. Here’s another quote from McCrory related to that topic:

“‘Displacement effects could materialize very quickly, so you want to establish a monitoring framework to understand that before it materializes so that we can catch it as it’s happening and ideally identify the appropriate policy response.’”

Several thoughts occurred to me:

1. Isn’t AI biased and prone to errors? Why would I want to become adept at using something that outputs incorrect information and creates a dependency on that system?
2. The flow of messaging about how AI will kill of jobs is not constructive. There are reports of some AI workers poisoning data. Others resent AI because it could cost them their livelihood.
3. Some firms, like Microsoft, are recalibrating their push into AI. Some analysts think that Microsoft has pushed AI too far, thus impairing the firm’s high margin businesses like Azure.

Something is going on when individuals seek to cause damage to the houses in which AI wizards live. Not even the mobile phone, an equally impactful product, put Steve Jobs at risk at his home. (There are rumors one senior Apple executive threw a Pepsi bottle at the Woz, but that remains unverified.)

Whitney Grace, April 23, 2026

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold. Did you know that the freedom loving cyclist at BearBlog thinks my essays are generated by AI. Censorship is okay, right?

One could be critical and say, “Australia’s social ban is not working.” Then one could say, “Australian teens have found workarounds, thus demonstrating one way to spark innovation.”

According to The Guardian in “Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is A Flop. But There’s No Joy In ‘I Told You So,’” seven in ten teens still remain on social media platforms. I think that is of 100 young people, only 30 have just given up on the addictive platforms.

The eSafety report also noted that there hasn’t been any major changes to cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children. The ban was supposed to keep kids safe from the potential harms that come with social media: the aforementioned bullying, exploitation by pedophiles and other abusers, and impaired brain development.

Some experts predicted the ban wasn’t going to work. Australia’s eSafety commissioner had doubts and the Australian government knew there was lack of evidence that a ban would deliver the results the government wanted. Requisite legislation was passed. The write up said:

“The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.”

The Australian government seems to be probing the BAIT outfits (big AI tech and social media firms) to verify that these estimable organizations are following the rules of the Information Highway.

The ban ignored the bigger problem of a commercialized ecosystem, where everything and anything is monetized to generate revenue. The algorithmic reward systems are addictive, exploitative, and designed to function like quicksand: Easy to step into and tough to get out of.

Perhaps the Chinese and Russian approaches will deliver what Australia wants?

Whitney Grace, April 22, 2026

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

In my trusty feedreader this morning (April 19, 2026) I spotted a link to a tweet posted to X.com (that’s the Twitter thing). I found the post fascinating for two reasons. First, it is definitely fodder for a first year philosophy course discussion in a four year college. Second, it provides a checklist for matching one’s “status” to the new world that Palantir Technologies envisions for — you know — like everyone in the world.

A wizard explains to those not in the superior being class the items each must embrace to be considered as a candidate to move from serfdom to AI assistant. Thanks, Venice.ai. That is a cheery color palette.

I would like to work through each of the statements and provide my view of what is bubbling beneath the surface of this oracular bullet point list. Darn it. I have other work to do. I have to get my handouts in order for my two 2026 National Cyber Crime Conference presentations, and I have to post new write ups for this blog crafted by my team. I will, therefore, take the type of shortcut used by many Silicon Valley type thinkers and pick out three, offer observations, and then wrap with a net net. By the way, Palantir settled with i2 Ltd. over a certain shortcut to gain access to the details of the ANB file format, but I won’t go into details. I mean who cares how a company achieves its goals as outlined in the twitter emission.

Let me set this up. The twitter emission is about 1,030 words, according to the word count function in my UltraEdit application. That’s a whole lotta tweeting going on. The emission is a marketing piece for a new book titled “The Technological Republic.” The emission also is a “hey, stop asking what makes us do the Lord of the Rings kabuki.” I know this because the big tweet includes the statement “Because we get asked a lot.” Okay. A lot. Ideal for metrics.

There are 22 items in the list of precepts. Each precept includes a précis. The purpose of the emission is, therefore, to provide a ready reference to the Palantir way including seeing stones, magic, and superior creatures. It also will, in theory, cause books to fly from shelves or overload digital booksellers’ servers from the download demand. I hope this works.

Okay, here are the three precepts I have the time, energy, and patience to address.

This is precept 8, and I quote:

Public servants need not be our priests.

Like the other precepts, there is an accompany explanation for the unenlightened and uninitiated into the ways of Palantirism; to wit:

Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

I worked with a fellow who was into aikido and Zen. He routinely emitted what I thought were shallow thoughts wrapped in Philosophy 203 craziness. He called these explanations koans. He wanted to say something that sounded deep, good, and counter logical. I replied to one of his outputs which was very similar to the “if you reward this way like that outfit rewards, you would die like a dog in the desert” in precept 8. I told him, “If you don’t know this silliness off, I will let you out of the car and you can hitchhike on the next yak that comes down Rockville Pike.” He shut up.

Okay, let’s take a look at precept 12, and I quote:

The atomic age is ending.

Here is the explanation:

One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

I do recall that the US and Russia each have a hefty number of atomic weapons. China has some. North Korea may have some. There are rumors that Israel, Pakistan, and probably a few other countries have these devices. Furthermore, there are commercial and government operated nuclear power plants. There are fuel pools. There are plans for modular nuclear reactors. Right now there is AI based on Google’s transformer approach. When it comes to creating some issues, I think a pragmatic person is going to ask, “Hey, what if some of that radioactive material is used for nefarious purposes. You know. Just dump some in a drinking water supply to let a drone scatter some “dust” over a crowded city street. I know the AI thing is a “if we build it they will come.” That may be true, but it seems that there are some people engaged in push back; for example, the person who had harmful intent toward the big dog at OpenAI. Can hallucinating AI keep these honey badgers in their cage?

And the final precept. I picked precept 17, and I quote:

Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.

Before presenting the explanation, I like the “must.” Okay, mom or Zeus or whoever the twitter master is channeling. Here’s the explanation of this mandate:

Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

I think my interpretation of this is that the tech bros can make society a happy place. Is it possible that Silicon Valley thinking, products, and unregulated behavior have contributed to the current social vibe in the United States? Can technology fix the problems technology has created. If the answer is “yes,” then I think that one must examine the specific cases cited to support the argument. Saying “we know better” or “we can do it” does not convince me.

Several observations:

1. This is the rationale for allowing wizards to run the show, not just the US, the entire world. These folks believe they are the empowered.
2. The twitter emission is the first interesting broad propaganda messaging. Much, much more propaganda and jingoism will follow. This is not “disinformation.” This is what I call “reformation,” and it is part of the alternative facts craziness that seems to be winning in professional and consumer discourse.
3. The list of precepts is a yardstick against which Palantir, an AI, or a select group can measure an individual, an institution, or an educational institution. Getting an F means bad news.

Net net: This is applied psychological manipulation. It is a manifesto. This is what happens when technology is allowed to operate without meaningful oversight, internal ethical control mechanisms, or though processes not based on fantasy fiction. The Lord of the Rings is a novel. What’s unique is applying this to the Silicon Valley way. When I worked in Sillycon Valley, the “way” was traffic jams, arrogance, and a sense of entitlement. Have fun in Philosophy 101 with a group discussing this tweeter thing.

Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2026