The article title is click bait here is the full article:
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.
People like that CEO despise anything they don’t/wouldn’t do.
Only themselves are important, only their actions are valuable. Everyone else should be replaced for something cheaper that doesn’t involve recognizing other people as people. They only want automatized customers, but right now only people are clients, sooo…
They are destroying their target audience lol. But then, when they notice, they’ll start being even more coercive.
They want to monopolize rights and humanity for themselves. Everyone else should be grateful they are considering us as tools, how lovely /s
I don’t understand why we don’t revolt against the billionaires.
Does building a guillotine count as working with your hands?
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”).
Much would be solved if we were to eat one of them. I mean, it works for the chimpanzees…
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
Of all disciplines, he says that philosophy will be replaced with AI. What a moron.
“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
TL;DR: Tech billionaires like Karp see the rest of humanity as their worker bees.
They see us as livestock.
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.
I studied poetry, painting, and music so that my sons could study mathematics and commerce, and their sons could work long hours on the assembly - without having ever studied anything - so that they can consume slop generated by AI that was pushed on everyone by people who studied commerce, created by people who studied mathematics, and trained on the works of those who studied poetry, painting, and music.
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!
I don’t like where it’s going, and I dislike Palantir, but I also strongly disagree with calling manual work “peasant” labour. There’s nothing wrong with working with your hands.
There is everything wrong with having to work like a peasant because wealth hoarders want to hoard even more wealth
Let’s try not to fight over the false dichotomy a headline is designed to produce.
It’s bad if we have no choice but to work like peasants to survive.
It’s good if you enjoy working with your hands and probably most people would benefit from doing that more, even if you don’t want to do so full time.
The important takeaway from the article is “Fuck that guy”
And many of those jobs still require an understanding of higher math/physics. An uneducated electrician is a dead one.
He is lying about its capabilities to protect the stock price
If he keeps this up, he may have to learn to work without his head like an aristocrat.
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.
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.
Of course he craps on philosophers. What good is it philosophy for somebody without ethics?
as a CS grad and having worked in software for 10 yrs… this is just delusion.
