My awakening began in the modern fashion — late at night, on YouTube. Months later the video still has just 3,900 views, so I’d better describe it.

A few dozen people have gathered to watch a presentation. It’s capably produced — like a midsize college professor’s audition for a TED Talk. The presenter, in a patterned blazer and blue oxford, is retired four-star general Gustave Perna. “I spent 40 years in the Army,” Perna begins, the hard edges of his New Jersey accent clanging a little in the room. “I was an average infantry officer. I was a great logistician.”

It’s a leisurely start. And yet the closest comparison I have for what comes next is Star Wars. Because once he gets through his slow-crawl prologue, Perna tells a story so tense and futuristic that, by the end, it’s possible to glimpse a completely different way in which we might live as citizens. Also, there’s warp speed.

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Perhaps Perna’s name sounds familiar. It should. He oversaw the effort to produce and distribute the first coronavirus vaccines — a recent triumph of U.S. policy that’s been erased by the stupidity of U.S. politics. Perna was a month from retirement in May 2020 when he got a Saturday morning call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Arriving in Washington two days later to begin Operation Warp Speed, his arsenal consisted of three colonels, no money and no plan.

The audience is focusing now. Perna tells them that what he needed more than anything was “to see myself.” On the battlefield this means knowing your troops, positions and supplies. It means roughly the same thing here, except the battlefield is boundaryless. Perna needed up-to-the-minute data from all the relevant state and federal agencies, drug companies, hospitals, pharmacies, manufacturers, truckers, dry ice makers, etc. Oh, and that data needed to be standardized and operationalized for swift decision-making.

It’s hard to comprehend, so let’s reduce the complexity to just a single physical material: plastic. Perna had to have eyes on the national capacity to produce and supply plastic — for syringes, needles, bags, vials. Otherwise, with thousands of people dying each day, he could find himself with hundreds of millions of vaccine doses and nothing to put them in.

To see himself, Perna needed a real-time digital dashboard of an entire civilization.

This being Washington, consultants lined up at his door. Perna gave each an hour, but none could define the problem let alone offer a credible solution. “Excruciating,” Perna tells the room, and here the Jersey accent helps drive home his disgust. Then he met Julie and Aaron. They told him, “Sir, we’re going to give you all the data you need so that you can assess, determine risk, and make decisions rapidly.” Perna shut down the process immediately. “I said great, you’re hired.”

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Julie and Aaron work for Palantir, a company whose name curdles the blood of progressives and some of the military establishment. We’ll get to why. But Perna says Palantir did exactly what it promised. Using artificial intelligence, the company optimized thousands of data streams and piped them into an elegant interface. In a few short weeks, Perna had his God view of the problem. A few months after that, Operation Warp Speed delivered vaccines simultaneously to all 50 states. When governors called panicking that they’d somehow been shorted, Perna could share a screen with the precise number of vials in their possession. “‘Oh, no, general, that’s not true.’ Oh, yes. It is.”

The video cuts off with polite applause. The audience doesn’t seem to understand they’ve just been transported to a galaxy far, far away.

When Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union on March 7, he’ll likely become the first president to use the phrase artificial intelligence in the address. The president has been good on AI. His executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” threw a switch activating the federal bureaucracy’s engagement. He’s delegating to smart people and banging the drum about generative AI’s ability to create misinformation and harm national security. That’s plenty for a speech.

But the vision remains so small compared with the possibilities. This is technology that could transform almost everything about our society, yet neither the president nor his political rivals have imagined how it might do the same for the government itself. So allow me.

According to a 2023 year end Gallup poll, Americans’ confidence in 15 institutions — covering things such as health care, education and regulation — is at historic lows. The poll’s conclusion is that government is suffering an acute crisis of legitimacy. We no longer trust it to fix important things in our lives. If confidence in the effectiveness of government keeps eroding at this pace, how much longer do you think we can remain united? How easy do we want to make our dismantling for the nihilists already cheering it on?

Properly deployed, AI can help blaze a new path to the shining city on a hill. In 2023, the national taxpayer advocate reported that the IRS answered only 29 percent of its phone calls during tax season. Human-based eligibility decisions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have a 44 percent error rate. Large-language-model-powered chatbots could already be providing better service — at all hours, in all languages, at less cost — for people who rely on the federal government for veterans benefits, student loans, unemployment, social security and Medicare. That’s table stakes.

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Now think about Warp Speeding entire agencies and functions: the IRS, which, in 2024, still makes you guess how much you owe it, public health surveillance and response, traffic management, maintenance of interstates and bridges, disaster preparedness and relief. AI can revolutionize the relationship between citizens and the government. We have the technology. We’ve already used it.

Mention Operation Warp Speed to skeptics and they’ll wave you off. It doesn’t count. In a crisis the great sloth of government can sprint, but in regular times procurement rules, agency regulators and the endless nitpicking of politics make big things impossible. All true.

There’s another strain of skepticism that goes like this: Are you insane? AI might create all kinds of efficiency, but it’s also been known to have systemic biases that could get encoded into official government systems, lack transparency that could undermine public trust, make loads of federal jobs obsolete, and be vulnerable to data breaches that compromise privacy and sensitive information. If AI were a Big Pharma product the ads would be 10 minutes long.

We can put guardrails around how the government uses AI — anonymizing personal data as they do in the European Union, creating oversight bodies for continuous monitoring — but I’m not naive. Some things will still go wrong. Which leaves us to weigh the risks of the cure against the deadliness of the disease.

To check my premise, I set up a Zoom call with Perna. He was in sweats at his home in Alabama, and if he missed carrying the weight of the world he did a great job hiding it. He consults a little for Palantir now, but mostly he was excited to talk about grandkids, the Yankees and the best New York City slice joints. His mood shifted when I asked what government could improve if it embraced AI. “Everything,” he snapped, before the question was fully out. “I don’t understand how we’re not using it for organ donation right now. We should be ashamed. Why do we need 80,000 new people at the IRS? We could revolutionize the budget process. I tell Palantir, why are you playing around with the Department of Defense? Think bigger.”

What Palantir does has long been draped in mystery. It’s a software company that works with artificial intelligence and is named for the indestructible crystal balls in The Lord of the Rings, so they’re not exactly discouraging it. But the foundation of its products is almost comically dull.

Imagine all of an organization’s data sources as a series of garden hoses in your backyard. Let’s say the organization is a hospital. There are hoses for personnel, equipment, drugs, insurance companies, medical supplies, scheduling, bed availability and probably dozens of other things. Many of the hoses connect up to vendors and many connect to patients. No one can remember what some of them are supposed to connect to. All were bought at different times from different manufacturers and are different sizes and lengths. And it’s a hospital, so hose maintenance has never been anyone’s top priority. Now look out the window. There’s a pile of knotted rubber so dense you can’t see grass.

Palantir untangles hoses.

“We’ve always been the mole people of Silicon Valley,” says Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect. “It’s like we go into the plumbing of all this stuff and come out and say, ‘Let’s help you build a beautiful ontology.’”

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In metaphysics, ontology is the study of being. In software and AI, it’s come to mean the untangling of messes and the creation of a functional information ecosystem. Once Palantir standardizes an organization’s data and defines the relationships between the streams, it can build an application or interface on top of it. This combination — integrated data and a useful app — is what allows everyone from middle managers to four-star generals to have an AI co-pilot, to see themselves with the God view. “It’s the Iron Man suit for the person who’s using it,” says Krishnaswamy. “It’s like, they’re still going to have to make decisions but they feel like they’re now flying around at Mach 5.”

The most dramatic expression of Palantir’s capabilities is in Ukraine, where the company merges real-time views from hundreds of commercial satellites with communications technology and weapons data. All of that information is then seamlessly displayed on laptops and handheld dashboards for commanders on the battlefield. A senior U.S. military official told me, “The Ukrainian force is incredibly tough, but it’s not much of a fight without iPads and Palantir.”

I mentioned that progressives and some of the military establishment dislike Palantir. Each has a reason. The company was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, which explains much of the hatred from the far left. Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican convention, endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, dislikes multiculturalism, financed a lawsuit to kill Gawker and then tried to buy its corpse. The enmity here is mutual, but also kind of trivial.

Palantir has another co-founder. His name is Alex Karp, and many people in the Pentagon find him very annoying. The quick explanation is that Karp is loud and impatient, and he’s not one of them. But it’s more troubling than that.

Karp was born in New York City to a Black mother and a Jewish father. He’s severely dyslexic, a socialist, a 2016 Hillary Clinton supporter. When we spoke in Palantir’s New York offices, it was clear that he’s both whip-smart and keeps a careful accounting of the slights he’s accumulated. “Quite frankly,” Karp told me, “just because of biographical issues, I assume I am going to be screwed, right?” It was like meeting the protagonist from a book co-authored by Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth.

Thiel and Karp were law school classmates at Stanford in the early ’90s. They argued plenty, but agreed about enough to create Palantir with partial funding (less than $2 million) from In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the CIA, and a few core beliefs. The first is that the United States is exceptional, and working to strengthen its position in the world benefits all humanity. “I’ve lived abroad,” Karp says. “I know [America] is the only country that’s remotely as fair and meritocratic as America is. And I tend to be more focused on that than the obvious shortcomings.” In a speech last year, Karp, who is CEO, explained what this means for the company: “If you don’t think the U.S. government should have the best software in the world … We respectfully ask you not to join Palantir. Not in like you’re an idiot, just we have this belief structure.”

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The company’s second core belief springs from the chip on Karp’s shoulder. Like generations of Black and Jewish entrepreneurs before him, Karp presumes his company isn’t going to win any deals on the golf course. So to get contracts from Fortune 500 companies and governments Palantir must do things other software companies won’t, and do them so fast and cheap that the results are irrefutable.

This approach has worked exceedingly well in the corporate world. Palantir’s market capitalization is $52 billion and its stock has climbed more than 150 percent in the past year, largely because of demand for its AI products. But for much of its existence, an openly patriotic company with software better, faster and cheaper than its competitors was shut out of U.S. defense contracts. In the mid-2010s this put Palantir’s survival at risk and sharpened Karp’s indignation to a fine point. Either his biography had made him paranoid or something was amiss.

In 2016, Palantir took the unprecedented step of suing the Pentagon to find out. The case alleged the Defense Department was in violation of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, a 1994 law that prohibits the government from starting new bloat-filled projects if an off-the-shelf solution is available. The House Committee on Government Operations made its intent unusually clear: “The Federal Government must stop ‘reinventing the wheel’ and learn to depend on the wide array of products and services sold to the general public.”

The record of Palantir v. United States is about as one-sided as these things can be. In the Court of Federal Claims, Palantir was able to document soldiers, officers and procurement people acknowledging the supremacy and lower cost of its in-market products — and show the Pentagon was still buying a more expensive proposal, years from effective deployment, offered by a consortium of Raytheon, Northrop........

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