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.
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.
I don’t understand why we don’t revolt against the billionaires.
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.
Feet first?
Of course
Indeed. Industrial methods for the post industrial age…
And CEOs will be working with their heads, as intended.
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.
Conservatives aren’t very intelligent, for starters, and it’s been seen that they operate more using the fear centers of their brains(which I imagine gets even more activated when they’re made to be more and more poor by the wealthy as time goes on).
They’re the kind of people who fall for branding super easily. I mean, look at how one-note most of them are, they just do what lines up because breaking away from their “role” is scary and they don’t have a roadmap for it. Plus their friends lack the emotional intelligence to allow their other friends to do stuff without mocking them.
And then you got all the people who seem to think it’s better that everyone get rat-fucked lest even one person gets something they “don’t deserve”, whatever that means. Or the people who are so used to bosses screwing them over that instead of fighting for my rights and equality they give the line “well they own the company so they get to do what they want” which I genuinely don’t believe is a entirely reflection of their desire to be that person but instead more their fear of authority and retribution for them “acting out”. Think of how scared they get when someone offers to raise taxes on the rich and they come out talking about how rich people will leave and take their money away.
Conservatives are scared people while the far-right both knows how and loves to exploit that and they’re too dumb to notice the obvious lying.
I think what we’re seeing right now on the far right is typical of anti-intellectualism.
It’s spreading. It’s a symptom of fascism.
Much would be solved if we were to eat one of them. I mean, it works for the chimpanzees…
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 think more want to be “influencers” because they don’t have any relatives that can give them a small multi-million dollar loan.
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.
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Good job condoning terrorism.
I wasn’t condoning.
If that’s the path they want then they should know what it entails.
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.
“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
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.
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?
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.
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.
TL;DR: Tech billionaires like Karp see the rest of humanity as their worker bees.
They see us as livestock.
He is lying about its capabilities to protect the stock price
Honestly I hope so. It would be great if AI didn’t make human beings obsolete.
I think he’s vocally self delusional. He does actually believe it, but he’s incentivized to delude himself into that belief. And incentivized to say it publicly.
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 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.
Why do we tolerate these people?
Because most Americans with slack jaws hunch over their smartphone gawking at tiktok videos of people they hope to one day be but never will.
Really feeling the victim blaming here when they made the devices into virtual heroine
There’s probably a good analogy out there about addiction but I saw something flashy on my smartphone and got distracted.
You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals so we’re easy to distract and get fucken enamored
Well done! I remember that song fondly.
Okay, so that helps no one.
Anyone else have any input?
read this webcomic, and then consider the reality that we’re living in both of those worlds.
it’s easy to dismiss politics, corruption, fraud, rape, pedophelia, and all the other atrocious things people are dismissing, when you have infinite scroll on your instafacetwitsnaptoktube feed, and you’re fishing for those likes and subscribes, baby!
Thanks for the link, I just read through the foreward to Amusing Ourselves to Death and am looking forward to the full book.
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*heroin
No, no, they made devices into strong female protagonists!
/s
virtual heroine
Bro, come on. People are glued to their phones the same reason you’re glued to your computer.
The outside world fucking sucks unless you’re a scammer or rich enough to be scammed without noticing it.
It’s free to be on our devices, which is why most people are doing it. Everything else costs money that people straight up do not have.
“mOsT aMeRiCaNs…”
Blah, blah, blah. If you can tell me how to un-fuck this nation in a way that will actually wake people up, I’m all ears. But the way I see it, these things were insidiously marketed to the whole country slowly and incrementally, like frog in a slowly warming pot of water. Those of us who jumped out of the pot are watching in horror as the rest get boiled alive.
The problem is, frogs don’t have opposable thumbs and we can’t turn the gas off - so the pot keeps boiling.
The best you and I can do is to look out for each other, our friends and family and help anyone else that manages to escape the pot as quickly as possible so they don’t get back in…
My thoughts are that people are animals and they’ll follow where the majority go, so keep helping others escape the pot and eventually, more will notice there is an exit option and jump as well.
At the moment, I see this as the only real answer. Until there’s proper organization and resistance, everything is lip service.
Mobilization is easy - the protests and marches get people together in solidarity. But organization takes effort: it takes talking to people, getting numbers/contact info, making plans and deciding what’s next…
We’re still in the pot, dude. It’s a double-boiler, we only jumped out of the inner chamber where even the metal on the bottom doesn’t go above boiling temperature…
If you can tell me how to un-fuck this nation in a way that will actually wake people up
People are already Woke Up. They’re still powerless.
Agreed. We’re partially awake.
Yeah right. Almost half the people I talk to are not happy but are burning their heads in the sand and waiting/hoping for this to blow over. It can’t happen here and all that.
burning their heads in the sand
Ouch, sounds painful.
Powerless?
Or is it learned helplessness?
It’s exactly that.
This doesn’t happen in a bubble though. We need those people too. We need each other.
Look, I hate the Americans with a seething passion as well, but they’re getting fucked over even more than we are right now.
Evil doesn’t suddenly become okay when you dislike the victims…
In other words, a slave wants to have their own slaves, instead of being free.
That’s an ugly feature of human nature, as well as some victims thinking the solution to their victimization is to have someone they can victimize too.
I know you don’t necessarily mean it this way, but there’s a very interesting (and infuriating) history to why the US reveres the wealthy. The short version is that the ultra wealthy were pissed about the New Deal, so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh.
We will have to overcome that idea if we hope to gain real class consciousness.
The short version is that the ultra wealthy were pissed about the New Deal, so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh.
That concept existed WAY before the United State did.
The old idea was kings were rich because they were ordained to be kings by god. Questioning why the king was rich was questioning the word of god and punishable by death.
Sure, but why it exists today in the US is a direct result of the robber barons’ influence in the early 1900s. The core idea isn’t new, but this instance is.
Early colonized America used slave labor by racist christians. Those racist christians said they were supposed to be rich because god made them that way. That predates the robber barons of the early 1900s.
after decimating the indigenous americans that have been here more than 10k years.
after decimating the indigenous americans that have been here more than 10k years.
No argument on the truthfulness of your statement, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the premise of society enforcing the thought that the rich are rich because of god.
Great, congrats. You are today’s biggest pedant. Here’s your prize.
I’m not looking for pedantry. I’m looking for clarity. You eluded to a specific action by robber barons in the 1900s. I’m looking for what that is because I’m seeing that idea predate them.
It does predate them. They didn’t invent it, and I never said they did. I said their actions are the reason the US reveres wealth today, as in it’s the most contemporary set of events that have reinvigorated that well-practiced strategy.
If you’re looking for specific historical knowledge, as in citations, here you go:
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so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh
It’s much older. That bullshit goes back to John Calvin (16th century Christo-Taliban idiot), and there are even precedents for it in the Torah, though balanced by other provisions about behaving like a decent human.
Yes, I know. I’m not looking back at the entire timeline of history. I’m looking at the most recent example, because while the idea is not new, it is not an idea that lasts on its own; people wise up over time, which is why the idea gets rehashed by different figures at different points in history.
Makes sense for the overdrive push on the Christianity angle. It’s just obnoxious to someone who’s going pretty damn secular.
Yeah. Let’s show them how good we are with our hands.
Pray tell, how do you stop them?
I don’t want to get banned for answering this.
Wait, I got banned on Reddit for suggesting armed resistance to billionaires. It’s why I came here. Does the fediverse also ban people for suggesting we shoot the bastards?
Pretty sure it depends on the server and the community mods.
Fair enough. That’s the way the fediverse works. Although if allowing talk of violent resistance will get whatever server I am on defederated by most others, especially the major servers, it’s still a big problem for free discussion in today’s world.
I am definitely more free here than Reddit, so I am not too worried. I would assume that the mods here are not ban-happy, and would only stop me if I was being irresponsible. I will try to do so.
It depends, it’s more that it’s off topic for a tech sub.
Also calling for murder is generally frowned on.
I generally frown on murder too. However, if there is no lawful option to stop people from becoming tyrants, raping kids, killing protesters, etc, then unlawful options tend to present themselves to otherwise civilised people.
How ironic
Mario has a brother, who I’ve heard of recently.
What is it that supplies these oligarchs with power? what feeds their mass surveilance and data aggregation networks? It seems to me only a few moves are needed to place them on the same grid as us.
And behind what you’re suggesting is an even deeper root cause: money.
nice try, uncle sam.
I mean… what do you actually suggest? We take a vote on Lemmy about who to execute?
No vote is necessary, we have multiple complete lists and even data aggregators showing their relations to each other.
People with the message and reach to call for mass general strikes and national scale marches on DC still think they can stop fascism with elections. Maybe I’m just too cynical in that regard to see the true situation but it seems after continued release of evidences of impeachable and heinous crimes Congress and the SC are firmly on the side of the fascist, pedophile political cult.
This is what we call “cooked”
But theres still one super secret recipe that can save this dish
Because we’re stupid.
The system has evolved and is designed to make people obey the ruling class.
And systems have been overthrown in the past when they become intolerable.
Whatcha gonna do about them?
It’s not like I invite any of them over to smoke a joint. They exist and I can’t do much about it
These dudes do crack and ket not weed. You’re offerinf the wrong poison.
