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.
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.
CEOs will not be replaced any time soon, because they’re all in each other companies board and they’ll stand for each other (or more exactly from setting examples that could apply to them).
You’re right. But that can only last so long.