DENVER — At Palantir’s annual customer conference Wednesday, CEO Alex Karp unveiled Sybil, a biosensing microchip designed for intravaginal insertion that the company says will “complete the nervous system of Western civilization, one citizen at a time.”
The device, no larger than a IUD, is positioned against the anterior pelvic wall and uses ultra-wideband micro-radar vibrometry to detect microtremor activity in the surrounding pelvic-floor musculature. These tremors — involuntary, sub-perceptual, and continuous — are processed by Palantir’s onboard edge-computing layer and uplinked to the company’s AIP cloud infrastructure, where they are run against a proprietary affect model trained on, per the technical white paper, “the largest labeled dataset of psychophysiological stress responses ever assembled outside a classified context.”
The output is a real-time psychological profile.
“The pelvic floor doesn’t lie,” Karp told the audience, to sustained applause. “It is, in a sense, the last honest organ. And we are here to listen to it — on behalf of the people who need to know.”
Karp, asked during the Q&A whether the device constitutes a surveillance apparatus, pushed his glasses up and stared at the journalist for a long moment.
“Do you consider the immune system surveillance?” he said. “Because that’s what this is. We are giving Western liberal democracy an immune system. And the body always knows when something is wrong.”
Pelvic floor physical therapist. The pelvic floor lies constantly. Half my caseload is people whose pelvic floor is reporting an emergency that isn't happening. If Sybil treats microtremor as ground truth for stress, it's going to flag every runner, every new mother and anyone who coughs a lot.
So the false positive rate is going to be enormous, and the people flagged are going to be the ones with the least ability to dispute it.
I'm an OB-GYN, and placement is the first thing I'd ask about. An IUD-sized device on the anterior wall sits right where a lot of patients already have a pessary. I'd want to know what happens to people who have one, and to anyone who's pregnant, and I didn't see anyone at the conference ask.
Do the false positives go to the police or just the woman's employer?
The pilot-program FAQ says removal is available after death, subject to an administrative fee.
The release says edge computing and then says the signals get uplinked to AIP. Those are two different architectures. If the processing really happened on the device, only the profile would leave the body. If the raw tremor data goes to the cloud, the profile can be recomputed later by whoever has access, under whatever model they're running that year.
Stock was up six percent on the announcement. I'm not proud of it.
Is this opt-in? The release doesn't say, which I'm guessing means it doesn't need to.
they already did this with the covid swabs, this is just the public rollout