Feelings and Thiel-ings

We return after a short break, to talk about empathy,
advertising, and Palantir, an AI company that built a business
worth $15 billion with 30 salespeople – now featuring in its very
own drinking game!


We begin by talking about Moods, a service from Vevo, the company
that owns and manages most music videos on the Internet. Moods
now uses AI to identify the tone and emotion of music in order to
help advertisers more effectively target their campaigns –
initial options include ‘fun,’ ‘heartfelt,’ ‘impassioned,’ and
‘empowering.’


Now, the obvious problem with this service is it ignores the less
positive emotions that are integral to art, like sadness,
despair, and perhaps even hatred. How can we teach computers to
understand human emotion? And if the advertisers, in their
infinite wisdom, choose to focus exclusively on positive
emotions, who’s going to bankroll the next Nine Inch Nails?


In the second part of the podcast, we continue talking about one
of our favorite subjects – AI, analytics, and surveillance
wunder-venture Palantir. But there’s a plot twist: every time we
mention the name of its founder, libertarian saint Peter Thiel,
Max drinks. You can hear the podcast descending into chaos and
almost feel the anguish of our publisher.


What happened with Palantir? Well, the company is actually going
from the strength to strength, and has secured a major
distribution deal leveraging IBM’s considerable sales muscle.
This means a lot more Palantir software, used by many more
government agencies and corporations – joining the ranks of the
CIA, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, LAPD and the
Space Force.


We also cover: Gym music! Shoes! Doomscrolling! Things wrong with
IBM!


As always, you can find the people responsible for the circus
podcast online:


Max Smolaks (@maxsmolax)

Sebastian Moss (@SebMoss)

Tien Fu (@tienchifu)