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.
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.
bullies!
I’m fine with going back to a way of life that doesn’t include any of these psychopaths or their shit technology
It will include their technology, it will also include requirements that those maintaining the systems are capable beyond English Lit degrees…
Their dream is to have us build their Death Stars. We should crush their dreams.
When any AI hyper rants about AI/AGI ask this 1 simple question.
what happens to income.
Thing is capitalism requires income. Without it, it collapses. We have already sold future income (debt) and attention (ads and personal information) is sold as well. If AGI occurs: robots occur; and the snake eats itself.
It’s going nowhere. Relax, touch some grass and let the hype cycle disappear.
If it does happen, the discussion becomes all about income not how many employees we fired last month to make line go up. Cause next month line is ded.
These assholes are pushing the worker bees into another 1789 France.
Bees will actually kill their queen at times.
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.
We really should have gone for UBI when we had the chance. Maybe we never had the chance.
I was a massive proponent of UBI all the way back in like 2010. Got on to invite-only dedicated debate spaces specifically because of my advocacy.
I’d feel vindicated if I also wasn’t so depressed about where we’re at today as a country.
this time period is the chance, at some point it will be lost.
It’s not too late, but it won’t happen without a fight, and in fact, it’s the fight they’re so desperately distracting us from.
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.
“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.”
Just keep tryin bruh…
You first bub.
These people operate by the “rules for thee, not for me” rule.
Well, it does take hands to raise the guillotine’s blade . . . true. Might also take hands to lock billionaires into the guillotine. So, thanks for the suggestion!
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.
i mean i did that too. i dated someone filthy rich and it entirely warped my world view for a few years. it was a slow chip at my integrity but when i finally broke off the relationship and looked in from the outside of what i had become. just wow.
and it isn’t the money that corrupts. yes its probably part of it. but its the people you associate with while rich. you adopt part of their world view. you get influenced. you learn of the justifications. the whys. the reasons X and Y is done. its the entire fucking package of it that eventually changes you.
i’m glad i had the experience because now i have a fundamentally better understanding of humanity in general and the concept of how “power corrupts” actually looks like on the inside and in myself and how i could easily avoid it had i been able to see my own thoughts and behaviors slowly get corrupted.
and yes my initial thoughts going in was “that’s really weird but who am i to judge” until it became the norm.
so if this guy was ever a socialist. its pretty easy to understand what happened. and how it could be switched back.
Well he associated with Peter Thiel in college, I guess that’s enough said.
It is physically impossible to become a billionaire if you’re not evil.
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”).
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.
They won’t get much from the Canadian conservative far right. These people are all for cutting public services and rampant privatization… Someone would have to explain to me why someone who isn’t rich would want to vote for them.
Does building a guillotine count as working with your hands?
checks notes yes
See guillotines are very romantic. Old-timey. Classically French. That’s all well and good for their historical record, but we’re living in 2026 in America.
I think woodchippers are much more emblematic of our working class.
Indeed. Industrial methods for the post industrial age…
And CEOs will be working with their heads, as intended.
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
I actually don’t think this is true. I used to think it was true, but after seeing more and more people I think it’s simpler than that. It’s a belief in the justness of hierarchy— the “great chain of being” from medieval thought, where people on the top both deserve to be there by right of being there, and it is right to submit to them.
On a certain level, I even see the point. Despite anarchist clams to the contrary, leaders are important, necessary even to accomplish anything greater than a single person can manage. Even kids can see this first hand the first time they get assigned a group project by their teacher, or try to win a game of sports. But it’s too easy to twist “we need a good leader” into the tautology of “the leader is good, right, and justified because he’s the leader”.
If everyone rebelled against leadership all the time, there’d be no leadership, and people do need leaders. But at the same time, leaders can be or become shitstains that need to be rebelled against. It’s difficult, and I don’t think being reductive about the difficulty is right.
Yeah…it’s never gonna happen. I’m pretty sure the 1% don’t want us in their gang at all. We’re only the exploitable mass for them. We’re like slaves they can use to make more money.
Much would be solved if we were to eat one of them. I mean, it works for the chimpanzees…
Removed by mod
Good job condoning terrorism.
I wasn’t condoning.
If that’s the path they want then they should know what it entails.
