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Wondering what your career looks like in our increasingly uncertain, AI-powered future? According to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, it’s going to involve less of the comfortable office work to which most people aspire, a more old fashioned grunt work with your hands.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum yesterday, Karp insisted that the future of work is vocational — not just for those already in manufacturing and the skilled trades, but for the majority of humanity.
In the age of AI, Karp told attendees at a forum, a strong formal education in any of the humanities will soon spell certain doom.
“You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy; hopefully you have some other skill,” he warned, adding that AI “will destroy humanities jobs.”
Karp, who himself holds humanities degrees from the elite liberal arts institutions of Haverford College and Stanford Law, will presumably be alright. With a net worth of $15.5 billion — well within the top 0.1 percent of global wealth owners — the Palantir CEO has enough money and power to live like a feudal lord (and that’s before AI even takes over.)
The rest of us, he indicates, will be stuck on the assembly line, building whatever the tech companies require.
“If you’re a vocational technician, or like, we’re building batteries for a battery company… now you’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable,” Karp insisted. “I mean, y’know, not to divert to my usual political screeds, but there will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with vocational work or manufacturing. The global economy runs on these jobs. But in a theoretical world so fundamentally transformed by AI that intellectual labor essentially ceases to exist, it’s telling that tech billionaires like Karp see the rest of humanity as their worker bees.
It seems that the AI revolution never seems to threaten those who stand to profit the most from it — just the 99.9 percent of us building their batteries.
Of all disciplines, he says that philosophy will be replaced with AI. What a moron.
What sounded like impossible in absurdity few years ago seems to be today’s norm. Is that a competition of apocalyptic claims, a new religion? Actually these guys keep on trying to convince themselves and others in order to inflate the bubble till the end. It seems to be like coke, they’re so high on the power it gives them.
AI can’t even crank out a decent powerpoint presentation after my giving it explicit prompts and their shit AI’s going to take over jobs? I hope their stock crashes soon!
If he keeps this up, he may have to learn to work without his head like an aristocrat.
This dude is going to lose his nasal cavity from his coke addiction.
They’re stealing the power of information for themselves and kicking us back to manual labour jobs, until they steal that with robots too and we have zero means of engaging with the economy that controls all the world resources, so we just end up dying off, leaving them with the whole fucking planet to themselves.
I don’t understand why we don’t revolt against the billionaires.
Because these billionaires convinced the manual workers that intellectual workers are the real problem, so now they’re cheering that the “gay office workers will finally be cured of their homosexuality through pain therapy” (I know way too many people believing “getting spoiled as a kid” or not being taught how to be a man is responsible for queerness, which includes “not being the manliest man on the earth”).
Does building a guillotine count as working with your hands?
Not even revolt, I don’t understand why we just willingly hand them power. Like, half of Canada voted for the far-right Conservative party and the other half voted for the center-right, lower-case conservative party. It’s going as expected but we just keep doing it.
Many people live with the idea that one day they could became part of that 0.1 percent, and i mean it’s hard to blame them all of us independent from where we are have been feed with this kind of propaganda our entire life
Much would be solved if we were to eat one of them. I mean, it works for the chimpanzees…
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“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
I mean… this guy went from his early years as a self-professed socialist who went to protests and believed in social justice… to the most hyper-capitalist “let them eat cake” nutjob that you could imagine. What a world we live in.
Capitalists are so annoying. The hubris to assume we can accelerate climate change and ignore it and everything will just be hunky dory. It’s astounding these ding dongs think they’re outside the Earth system and not a part of it.
I’m tired of these techbro cultists without any humanity being in power at all.
This guy seems particularly and consistently bad. Or he just doesn’t have the same filter as the others.
You first bub.
He is lying about its capabilities to protect the stock price
These assholes are pushing the worker bees into another 1789 France.
There’s nothing billionaire oligarchs fear more than people who are capable of thinking for themselves. Of course they want to destroy the humanities…
Yes. It’s this, exactly. They don’t hate art, they hate how art unites us. And they hate how poignantly art can express how utterly thoroughly we outnumber them.
The groundwork was already set when they pinned all the atrocities of the west on the humanist tradition. The atrocities were committed by mercantilism, capitalism, religion, and colonialism.
The humanist tradition gave us secularism, democracy, human rights, and even the very concept of equality, without which we never would have developed post-modern ideals such as egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and inclusivity.
Those concepts were originally encapsulated by the term “liberalism,” hence we have things like “liberal arts,” “liberal democracy,” and “liberal education.” Unfortunately, capitalist conservatives appropriated the terminology and gave us the corruption that is neoliberalism: austerity for the poor, tax-cuts and subsidies for the wealthy, deregulation of markets and industries, just one step away from anarcho-capitalism and technofeudalism.
But people today, lacking the nuance that a liberal education would instill, conflate neoliberalism with humanist liberalism due to the nominal resemblance. Hence, leftists have engendered a hatred for “liberals,” when what they really hate are “neoliberals.”
These are the kinds of nuances that matter, and seem to be all but lost these days…
Hating on the humanities has been a talking point of the right wing for a long time, specifically because the empathy it nurtures leads to solidarity instead of survival of the fittest mentality. They say that these studies are useless to society, while capitalists are the only class that truly sits on top of society and leeches off of it
That’s because they don’t believe in intrinsic value. They don’t believe human beings are inherently worthy of dignity and respect. They think those are things that have to be earned, and earned at the expense of others at that. They think dignity comes from being exalted above others, so they push others down while scrambling to boost themselves up.
They don’t want to live in a world where everyone is equally dignified. To them, if they have no one to look down on, they feel they themselves are a diminished thereby. It goes all the way down the social ladder. Even the lowest hick in the trailer park finds someone on TV in a more wretched condition than themselves, so that they can feel lofty.
They view life as a zero sum game, and the only measurement of value or worth that they recognize is monetary. It’s to the point where you can’t even talk to them about intrinsic value, because they’ll think you’re talking about finances.
That’s why they think financial oligarchs are kings. They view them as “winners” at life, as if they got there by hard work, diligence, and other platitudes, rather than by stealing the value of the labor and innovation of the people subject to them and siphoning and hoarding the wealth of society.
It’s why they don’t believe in taxing the rich to fund the welfare state. They don’t view people at the “bottom” of the social hierarchy as being worthy of dignity and respect, let alone the care and support of society and civil governance. To them, money is all that’s important, and when they look at a balance sheet, they see anything going to help the poor as a “waste.”
It’s tragic. It could have all been avoided, if we had elected better leaders, if education had been prioritized more by society, particularly liberal arts and the humanities. They don’t generate profit, so the same people view those things as a waste. But how is a society going to raise the next generation of leaders without a strong base in the humanities and liberal arts?
