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.
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.
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.
All while all the corporations tried to adapt AI are getting burned with it.
Replacing me my ass. It’s just a lot of anti-intellectualist workers are cheering on the tech, because the ruling class convinced them that the “elite” meant “person with ternary education”.
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.
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.
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
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.
Does building a guillotine count as working with your hands?
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…
checks notes yes
And CEOs will be working with their heads, as intended.
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.
Honestly I don’t give a shit as long as I can make a living. I wouldn’t mind working in a workshop or something. However, I don’t think we’re prepared for the millions upon millions of people who will lose their jobs becasue of AI.
The thing we’re not prepared for is to respect trades; we can barely respect anyone as it is but trades especially are seen as “stupid jobs”. It’s also insane that basic rights and comfort within a job seem foreign in those fields, such as basically only existing as jobs with dogshit, early hours, if they’re even consistent to begin with, and toxic workplaces where people are expected to break themselves and be infinitely subservient to their bosses.
I like working with my hands and yet have zero desire to put myself through that bullshit. If it were a good environment I would happy to be anything from a mechanic(I do that work on my own cars) to a lineman but the whole thing is fucked.
“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
He is lying about its capabilities to protect the stock price
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.
Honestly I hope so. It would be great if AI didn’t make human beings obsolete.
Hey as long as I can get paid like a knowledge worker, I’d prefer to work with hands.
Yeah, when Karp says “there will be plenty of jobs” he doesn’t mention the wages those jobs will pay…
Of course he craps on philosophers. What good is it philosophy for somebody without ethics?
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.
The rest of us, he indicates, will be stuck on the assembly line, building whatever the tech companies require.
Meanwhile…
China is accelerating the rollout of fully automated “dark factories,” where production continues non-stop without lighting, human workers or shift changes. https://e.vnexpress.net/news/tech/tech-news/no-lights-no-workers-ai-powered-dark-factories-are-reshaping-china-s-manufacturing-4921224.html
And China, for all its flaws, won’t throw its people under the bus.
as a CS grad and having worked in software for 10 yrs… this is just delusion.
If he really believed his crap, he would have quit to work as a llama herder by now.
