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.
These morons really think AI is going to allow them to replace the technical folks. The same technical folks they severely loathe because they’re the ones with the skills to build the bullshit they dream up, and as such demand a higher salary. They’re so fucking greedy that they are just DYING to cut these people out in order to make more profits. They have such inflated egos and so little understanding of the actual technology they really think they’re just going to be able to use AI to replace technical minds going forward. We’re on the precipice of a very funny “find out” moment for some of these morons.
These morons really think AI is going to allow them to replace the technical folks.
This specific moron was actually talking about people with a humanities degree.
Even less plausible. There was a paper published recently arguing that by design LLMs are quite literally incapable of creativity. These predictive statistical models represent averages. They always and only generate the most banal outputs. That’s what makes them useful.
Well, every academic field needs creativity. But it’s nothing new that people from economic or tech bubbles have a disdain for humanities.
The degree of randomness in generative models is not necessarily fixed, it can at least potentially be tunable. I’ve built special-purpose generative models that work that way (not LLMs, another application). More entropy in the model can increase the likelihood of excursions from the mean and surprising outcomes, though at greater risk of overall error.
There’s a broader debate to be had about how much that has to do with creativity, but if you think divergence from the mean is part of it, that’s within LLM capabilities.
That’s a good point. The problem is that LLMs are calibrated for efficacy. Forcing them to be more chaotic also makes them less effective. This inherent tension is why they’re mathematically incapable of consistent creativity.
A healthy chuck of CEOs have a humanities degree. It’s a common undergrad before moving to B and J-School.
I think these guys forget that ai is just a program written by drumroll please HUMANS. Sure we could shitcan every programmer and replace them with “vibe coders” and skate by for a year or two but when bugs crop up and backend issues pile up AI is not gonna unfuck the mess they created and it will require human intervention. If these pricks do away with the technical folk well get to that point and suffer a technological collapse because everybody that knew how to code fled or changed careers so they could pay rent.
The FOSS ecosystem will be fine, because it’s maintained by people who do it for the love of the craft.
The scary part is how it already somewhat is.
My friend is currently(or at least considering) job hunting because they added AI to their flow and it does everything past the initial issue report.
the flow is now: issue logged -> AI formats and tags the issue -> AI makes the patch -> AI tests the patch and throws it back if it doesn’t work -> AI lints the final product once working -> AI submits the patch as pull.
Their job has been downscaled from being the one to organize, assign and work on code to an over-glorified code auditor who looks at pull requests and says “yes this is good” or “no send this back in”
I feel like so much LLM-generated code is bound to deteriorate code quality and blow out of the context size to such an extent that the LLM is eventually gonna become paralyzed
I do agree, LLM generated code is inaccurate, which is why they have to have the throw it back in stage and a human eye looking at it.
They told me their main concern is that they aren’t sure they are going to properly understand the code the AI is spitting out to be able to properly audit it (which is fair), then of course any issue with the code will fall on them since it’s their job to give final say of “yes this is good”
It would be interesting to know where your friend works and what kind of application it’s on, because your comment is the first time I’ve ever heard of this level of automation. Not saying it can’t be done, just skeptical of how well it would work in practice.
That was my general thought process prior to them telling me how the system worked as well. I had seen claude workflows which does similar, but to that level I had not seen before. It was an eye opener.
They don’t even dream it up any more. They hire brains, sift through their ideas, and say “I like that. Do that.”
After that, they are experts in manipulating finances to makes their companies rich, and themselves richer, by paying the people who actually do the work, make the money, and create the shareholder value, as little as possible.
At this point, I question whether they’re even experts in that kind of finance, or if they’re just connected to each other well enough, and have a few willing experts in hand, to maintain their position.
I honestly think the only thing most of them have going for them is that it’s their name on the accounts.
That’s called “appropriating the surplus value of labor”
I like that, explains the situation succinctly.
I can’t take credit for it. I believed the man who coined the term was named Carl something.
Or maybe he spelled his name with a K… Karl, Marquis? Marcus? Marquette? Something like that…
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The rich fully intend to replace workers with slaves one way or another.
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AI robots can be utter shit and they will still be leaps and bounds more efficient than the task specific automation that has been replacing human workers for decades.
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As long as the rich maintain their monopolies quality of service can drop indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if AI robots suck ass when no human employed company can compete and every other option is just as ass.
AI robots can be utter shit and they will still be leaps and bounds more efficient than the task specific automation that has been replacing human workers for decades.
I disagree with this, and we already have live examples today that are good analogs. Youtube is being flooded with AI generated slop. AI generated scripts, read by AI generated voices, over top of AI generated images.
I never seek these out, and actively avoid them when I can tell what they are before clicking on them. In that first 2 seconds of AI generated voice, I can tell this is slop and stop watching it seeking a human generated video instead.
As long as the rich maintain their monopolies quality of service can drop indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if AI robots suck ass when no human employed company can compete and every other option is just as ass.
It can’t. At some point the quality of the product drops to a level it is no longer a product. Lets say we’re in your theoretical dystopian future where the monopoly exists for cookies. There is no other place to buy cookies except from the monopoly. You posit that quality can drop indefinitely as there is zero alternative sources for cookies. So lets say the monopoly cookie brand was deciding to substitute some of the wheat flower with sawdust as a cost saving measure with the consequence being yet lower quality cookies. At a tiny fraction of sawdust you may notice it, but the sawdust cookie may still be better than no cookie. The monopoly continues to increase the sawdust content until the cookie contains zero wheat flour and is entirely substituted with sawdust. I believe even you would concede you would no longer buy the sawdust cookies at this point. Further, you would have stopped buying them earlier when the sawdust content became so high that the cookie was inedible to you even though it contained some wheat flour at that point.
This same thing will apply to Youtube. If the only thing left to watch on youtube is AI slop because no human creators exist, then there is no point in watching youtube anymore.
The point here, is that even with a monopoly on a product, as soon as the quality drops below a certain threshold (and this point is different for every consumer), the product stops being a product to them.
And yet youtube is still the dominant video host.
You’re missing the point entirely. If instead of luxuries you look through the lens of necessities perhaps you’ll see.
Like replace cookies with bread and try tell me people will choose to starve first. Like obviously not.
You’re just too priveledged to realize what I’m describing has been going on in developing countries for decades.
Ask a ford employee 30 years ago about robot automation. Like this is not a new thing in the 2020s. The rich have a playbook for this.
And yet youtube is still the dominant video host.
Youtube hasn’t descended to being unusable yet.
You’re missing the point entirely. If instead of luxuries you look through the lens of necessities perhaps you’ll see. Like replace cookies with bread and try tell me people will choose to starve first. Like obviously not.
I think you’re missing the point. If we substitute bread in the example I gave and they’re putting sawdust in it, then yes people will not buy bread made with zero flour, but instead made with sawdust. Yes, people will stop buying bread in that situation because they would die anyway because the bread doesn’t produce nutritional value.
Ask a ford employee 30 years ago about robot automation. Like this is not a new thing in the 2020s. The rich have a playbook for this.
Now you’re speaking against your original point. Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle. If anything it has increased it. A robot can have assembly tolerances much tighter than a human. Where is the lowering of quality from a robot making the vehicle that your original thesis demands?
Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle
I never said that and the quality of a ford truck is irrelevant to the assembly worker who lost their job due to automation.
You need to back up because you have gone down a tangent alone.
The notion that people won’t eat sawdust bread is demonstrably false with many historical examples proving you wrong. Your stipulation about zero flour is a moving goalpost and a strawman fyi
Robot automation has not lowered the quality of a Ford vehicle
I never said that and the quality of a ford truck is irrelevant to the assembly worker who lost their job due to automation.
You need to back up because you have gone down a tangent alone.
I agree we’re down a tangent, but I’m following the logic of your responses. This is a response to your original thesis: “AI robots can be utter shit”. Then you introduced the ford example for automation, which isn’t shit for assembly.
Which point to you want to back up to that would change our conversation path?
The notion that people won’t eat sawdust bread is demonstrably false with many historical examples proving you wrong.
I’m glad you saw those. I specifically chose sawdust in my example because of those events in history. Those support what I’m talking about. When the adulteration of the food became bad enough, people stopped eating it.
Your stipulation about zero flour is a moving goalpost and a strawman fyi
My “zero flour” comment is a response to your original thesis where you said: “quality of service can drop indefinitely.”
It can’t be indefinitely. There’s a point where people will stop consuming it when it gets bad enough.
you said: “quality of service can drop indefinitely.”
What I actually said was…
As long as the rich maintain their monopolies quality of service can drop indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if AI robots suck ass when no human employed company can compete and every other option is just as ass.
So yes you have completely missed my point and are arguing with yourself, not me.
It can’t be indefinitely. There’s a point where people will stop consuming it when it gets bad enough.
Yes but I’m not talking about that. You need to go back and reread what I actually said and stop putting words in my mouth and trying to have a discussion with me that doesn’t exist.
In that first 2 seconds of AI generated voice, I can tell this is slop and stop watching it seeking a human generated video instead.
Report that crap, every time. I’s a plague.
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Not just the high payed software folks, but the data centers are also maintained by highly skilled and hard working techs. And this technology is only possible with constant pristine maintenance if the servers to train their models. They loathe these people just as much and can’t wait to get humans out of the process
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.
And their goal is to make sure you can’t do anything without THEIR tools/plants, so that you don’t escape from their control.
Imagine we all work with our hands but decide we’ll only sell what we produce to our local communities and not large corporates.
Those who work with our hands can also swing an axe.
And we will do it with our own hands… he was right… he was right from the very start
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.
I’m more open-minded. Billionaires shouldn’t exist until we’ve solved the problem of global poverty. After that, I’m willing to consider the possibility, though I am unconvinced that billionaires deliver any societal benefit that compensates for the many downsides caused by their existence.
I’m more closed-minded. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, period. What I’d like to do to the existing ones cannot be posted here because that would entail be banned from the community.
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?
Murder the elite with my bare hands? Welp guess i need to start working out.
I wouldn’t bother. They’re generally soft and weak. They didn’t get rich working hard. You can whup them.
They tend to hire body guards.
Good point. Take out the body guards quickly, deal with the Sociopathic Oligarch slowly.
If the billionaires are hard to target, their help will be easier. Once people learn that associating with the billionaires can be bad for one’s health, two things will happen:
- Less available help.
- Much more expensive and much more short term help, to make the risk/reward sensible. If I can work for a month doing risky bodyguard duty for a fascist scumbag and get paid 20 mil, if nothing bad happens to me in that month, I am set for life. That kind of calculus can work up to a point. Just imagine managing this process tho, lol, looking for risk-hungry new fools every month. Not fun, not good for the morale.
Yeah but i wanna look good when i do it. Standards have been set. Now I’m not a Luigi but I’m not a Wario either so i wanna be at least leaned up a little.
But I’m also soft and weak.
I want to believe that they are, but they don’t have to worry about working long hours sitting on their asses. They get to make millions while paying a personal trainer and traveling the world.
I sit on my ass and eat. At this point I think my 7 year old could best me in fisticuffs.
You don’t own a shovel? If you have hands, you can make a shovel. We will need the shovels for the mass grave after the elite are all gone. You know, so we don’t allow the spread of diseases from necrotizing flesh.
Yeah, they aspire to neo-feudalism, but that’s a political rather than technology position.
TL;DR: Tech billionaires like Karp see the rest of humanity as their worker bees.
They see us as livestock.
“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
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
Hopefully we can start to see the real reason why ‘capitalist’ US is spending so much taxpayer money on AI.
It’s for control. If the US AI industry fails, then China will be there to pick up the slack. US oligarchs cannot tolerate anyone but them controlling information, which is why they bought tiktok and twitter.
I’m tired of these techbro cultists without any humanity being in power at all.
He is such a self-centered, megalomaniac cunt.
Assume for a moment that AI really was taking all of these types of jobs, which by the way, almost certainly includes CEOs. It would only be a matter of time before robots take those other jobs he’s talking about.
A normal human of normal intelligence would see that and conclude that people simply wouldn’t have to work anymore. And that therefore, everyone should have their basic necessities taken care of by their governments.
People would be free to do whatever they want, whether it be “humanities” work or creating things or whatever. We’re no longer constrained by the fact that our lives depend on our usefulness in jobs to the ruling class.
Only a member of that ruling class would see themselves as indispensable and others as slave labor.
The problem is ownership.
These scumbags own all the means to produce and will demand compensation for their products. The one thing I don’t understand is if these fucks remove all the workers then who has money to buy their products? There isn’t an infinite demand for electricians, plumbers, carpenters etc etc… so there are going to be a lot of people without the means to earn a living.
I think the ownership class is thinking of revising “let them eat cake” into “let them eat dirt. We have no need for them.”
Whatever bad shit I want to say about Henry Ford, at least he understood the basic idea that people could only spend the amount of money that they have or make. That’s one of the things he’s famous for is that his factory workers could buy their own Model Ts.
We now live in a stupid reality where the world is controlled by rich people who see others as slaves and who are wanting to keep slave labor in perpetuity, even when the labor doesn’t need to exist.
There goal is to push people back to serfdom. They don’t care if the common man lives in a house or a shack. They don’t care if they can afford a car or have to walk. Their goal is to amass enough wealth (not just money), so they can bribe people to do what they want because they’ll be desperate. Robots, AI and Automation will cover the rest of it. They just need to keep a much smaller group happy who would become slightly better but still fearing they could lose everything.
They also don’t care if we starve to death. That’s just thinning the herd as far as they’re concerned.
Don’t like being livestock? Better get organized and do something about that.
I think the ownership class is thinking of revising “let them eat cake” into “let them eat dirt. We have no need for them.”
In the budding K-Economy, that seems to be the case. The objectively wealthy now make up something like 60% of consumer spending. It seems to be reaching the point that the majority of people can’t make enough money to even be considered vital to the economy.
there is no owner OR the only owner of anything would be the creator, unless the owned is someone with their own will.
interesting to translate this ownership topic to anything - earth, space, buildings, art, AI
their “ownership” is the lie we collectively believe, I hate this
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.
And many of those jobs still require an understanding of higher math/physics. An uneducated electrician is a dead one.
Are they stupid as fuck? On the knowledge of whom does he think their models are trained? Idiotic thieves.
Humanities is literally exactly what ai is terrible at.
The tech folks might need to reskill and look out.
People will still be writing excellent poetry and we will need it more than ever. It will be spoken word and written and unreachable by the technical tendrils of these devils for training data.
People who think the humanities don’t matter are husks of human beings. Capitalist dogs with zero personality, no actual skill, and only insatiable greed. And apparently all pedophiles to boot.
These fucks lack humanity. They are AI agents with system prompt “mak munny”. Losers.
I’ve been in software my whole life.
My two oldest daughters are pursuing performing arts and I’m backing them all the way.
And it’s not that software/STEM jobs will disappear completely but clearly there’ll be less of them.
