I’ve always wondered about the hype around AI but it’s become clear what its true role will be–surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder.

Israel is a world leader in high-tech and AI, but much of it was developed with the blood and shattered bodies of Palestinians. Israel deploys AI and high-tech to surveil, control, and murder human beings, while continuously testing and refining the technology on a giant, open-air prison.

All of this has given the Silicon Valley tech-bros a boner. Most of them are quasi-fascists and they are really, really interested in surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. This is why American tech firms partner with Israel, have veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, working for them, and buy up Israeli start ups. It also helps us understand why they have been willing to spend insane amounts of money on AI.

In Gaza, Israel is targeting civilian members of Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. There’s also a particularly diabolical AI targeting program called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks any Palestinian civilian, somehow associated with Hamas, home, then bombs and kills the whole family.

Palantir has also scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine an AI program called Maven, for the US armed forces. The military calls Palantir’s Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide US airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.”

Seeing the way Israel uses AI should be setting off alarm bells. Instead the esteemed leaders of Silicon Valley are competing to join the party. Some of these personalities are close to President Donald Trump including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, partner of Palantir with Alex Karp. and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen helped shape the President-elect’s tech policy agenda. To “take the lead over China” on AI, campaign allies said the new administration will get rid of Biden’s AI guardrails and focus on autonomous weapons, intelligence, and cybersecurity.

The history of the development of computers and the internet demonstrates how high-tech can be used for surveillance, counterinsurgency and murder. Contrary to the feel-good stories about how the internet and computers were developed in Silicon Valley garages, in Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine, challenges conventional wisdom and says that the Internet was actually founded by the US government as part of their counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. The US government wanted to build a connected computer system that could collect and share real time intelligence, observe the world in real time, and watch and analyze people and political movements–especially communist or socialist ones.

Presently, the US is using AI directed violence to maintain its decaying empire, but what happens on the periphery of empire always returns to sender. “I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”

Sounds familiar. Not only is Palantir helping to murder Palestinians in Gaza but they’re also working with ICE to murder Americans.

Surveil, control and murder.

Coming to a locale near you.