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.
i wish the things nobody wishes on anyone on the Palantir CEO.
Hey grok, what’s the most efficient, yet emotionally satisfying way to liquidate our class of parasitic, pedophilic billionaires. Extra points for style!
Maybe they saw too many of us identifying that the biggest problem is the rich, rather than each other, so they’re trying to hide behind a new manufactured enemy.
Didn’t Ford’s CEO just say they wanted highschool graduates who could do math to be automotive techs making $120K a year?
Plumbers already make ridiculous amounts of money because there aren’t enough of them.
The median age in my field 5-10 years ago was 55 years old and we aren’t getting an influx of new A&P licensed techs still. The main way the Aviation industry gets it’s techs these days is the military and that’s not even a sure fire way.
Like. CEO’s doing trades when? Because he’s clearly mistaken if he thinks that it’s not going to be CEO’s and upper management people who get their jobs replaced by AI.
They keep trying to replace engineers, software devs and so on with AI at all the tech companies and then having to back out of that decision to keep things running.
First against the wall.
Ironically us plebs who work with our hands are the people with the skill set necessary to build those things.
We are also very capable of taking other things DOWN
And most jobs are manual labour. That guy wants to seem like he’s making an intelligent prediction about a supposed new paradigm shift for Humanity, but ends up just stating the status quo since a job is a job.
comfortable office work to which most people aspire
What ? Do people even aspire to work in the first place ? And idk about you, but I’d rather have been a craftswoman if you could still live off of that.
You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy; hopefully you have some other skill
You think AI can do PHILOSOPHY !? AI can barely put together one fucking function when coding, and you think it can do philosophy ? Either he’s knowingly lying (he is) or he understands so little about philosophy that the AI can fool him (probably also true)
Can someone take this insufferable prick out back with a shotgun already?
Notable that it’s the author of the article calling people peasants and talking down to workers, not Karp.
Fuck you Joe Wilkins. I hope Karp is right and you have to work with your hands like ‘a peasant’ in your words. You might have to do something useful for society instead of writing ragebait for Futurism.
I’m wondering if those who think that AI will replace our jobs have ever used “AI” (LLM), because it’s not very good.
I’m currently leading a business project at a big corporation, and an AI chatbot solution got pushed into my scope by executives, to be delivered free to the client as a pilot (screwing with my budget). Either Copilot Studio is absolute garbage, or we have incompetent engineers, because they can’t get it to work for 3 weeks now.
I have a hunch that in order for the latest fancy models to vomit back barely useable answers, thousands of the world’s best engineers and PhD-s are sweating blood 24/7, while using computing power and consuming energy that would have been enough for a continent in 2019.
Meanwhile they are also burning money like crazy, with no sustainable business model in sight. I’m not saying LLMs are not to stay, but there will be a huge bust, and it will assfuck the economy and workers, while these idiots will get bailed out by Daddy Small Government.
Sorry, buddy. I’ll burn down your fucking offices and data centers before I go back to manual labor.
I didn’t do 15 years of manual labor just to go back to that shit after I finally got out.
What’s crazy is how fragile their ai ecosystem is. The tech requires insane scaling in the form of data centers. We’ve hit the Moore’s law limit, this tech isn’t getting better in and of itself, it just gets better by adding more tpus and servers.
It all goes down if the data centers go down
They want slavery because ai taking jobs makes no economic sense and breaks labor theory of value. No human production means nothing has value. We are literally already seeing this with ai slop!
The humane solution is we get a society where that philosophy major actually gets to be a philosopher in a mostly post scarcity automated communist society… But that would mean these ghouls wouldn’t be in power so now they’re trying to tell us we need to go backwards in time to feudalism.
What an absolute fucking joke, their technology needs nationalized and given to the people, they belong in cages
What a motherfucker.
Fine. Plumber $800 an hour. Want food? A carrot for $70. Our society can let the rich win and split into a working class economy where working folks charge working folks wages for goods and services.
We “peasants” are the only reason the filthy rich have what they have, including food, and clean water to drink. They need us, we don’t need them.
Fuck these useless leeches. Billionaires should not exist.
