From AI to the military, tech oligarchs expand their empire.
Tech Leaders Join US Army Reserve to Bridge Technological Gap
The four men looked slightly stiff in their khaki uniforms. However, they all smiled as they took the oath of allegiance on June 13: “I solemnly swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” In truth, these four have little that is military about them. But they did not need to toughen up on the obstacle course or handle weapons to be granted the title of lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve and catapulted into this “Detachment 201,” whose name says nothing.
In reality, their know-how is much more valuable. Andrew Bosworth is the respected Chief Technology Officer of Meta, a key figure in the major innovations in virtual reality that Mark Zuckerberg dreamed of for his metaverse. Shyam Sankar is his counterpart at Palantir Technologies, the company co-founded by Peter Thiel, whose complex data analysis platforms are used by intelligence and defense agencies. As for Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew, they are both senior executives at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in other words, specialists in generative artificial intelligence (AI). The official mission of this quartet? “To bridge the technological gap between the commercial sector and the military world” and offer “strategic support on key projects such as hypersonic weapons, combat AI, or the detection of extraordinary talent,” the press was assured. In short: to bring tech and the military closer together, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, Palo Alto and West Point.
It is a return to the sources, when Silicon Valley was conceived, at the end of the Second World War, as a base of the military-industrial complex. Calculators, radars, sonars, and early guidance systems were then imagined and tested in the shadow of Stanford University, thanks to funding from large arms companies, before being deployed in the army. Isn’t the Internet an extension of ARPAnet, a military network designed in the research laboratories of Berkeley, the other great university in the San Francisco Bay?
Enjoyed this post by Thibault Helle? Subscribe for more insights and updates straight from the source.
