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.
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
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!
Huh, so people honestly think that what that other guy was saying was helpful in the slightest? Fucking wild, okay. No wonder nothing is getting done.
I am well aware that we’re living in a world of morons. Saying it helps no one. TIL victim blaming gets upvotes on non shitposting groups here. Maybe I should’ve just stayed on nazi reddit lmao
deleted by creator
*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.
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.
Powerless?
Or is it learned helplessness?
It’s exactly that.
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…
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.
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…
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?
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.
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.
Yeah. Let’s show them how good we are with our hands.
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
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.
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.
Because we’re stupid.
And we will do it with our own hands… he was right… he was right from the very start
Go ahead, arsehole. Keep pushing people who have less to lose each day.
They’ll craft tools all right.
Even your guards turn on you eventually.
I think that’s the main reason they’re trying to build robots. I once read a post by a security expert who said a group of very wealthy people paid him for advice on how to prevent their guards and servants from killing them in their bunkers after the end of civilization. His advice was to become family by marrying their children to the guards’ children, but I suppose using robots instead is much easier.
Someone has to manage the robots…
Idk we’ve learned that American citizens don’t do shit all even when the boots on their neck.
All those folks out protesting and getting in ICE’s face is nothing right?
I know you think the snark is cute or funny, but resistance is happening. Courts are ruling on things, people are protesting massively, and Minneapolis is actively resisting. Peacefully. Read your history. Peaceful protest does work.
Read your history. Peaceful protest does work.
I’ve read a lot of history. Peaceful protest works sometimes, and when it does, it requires a level of solidarity and organization we haven’t yet seen in the US. It also depends on how psyhopathic those in power are. There was peaceful protest against the Nazis, and those involved were murdered. Resistance against Stalinism went the same way. There’s no sign so far that Trump and senior MAGA leadership are in any way constrained by morality or human decency, so it’s really a question of how far civil society and institutional resistance can deter them.
Still, peaceful protest is definitely a less horrible option than violent direct action, though it’s possible to have both in parallel. Consider ML King and the more radical groups who didn’t practice non-violence such as the Panthers, or Gandhi and Chandra Bose.
It isn’t on their neck to be brutally frank. Going after illegal immigrants and terrorizing Minnesota isn’t hitting the vast majority of Americans. History shows when the middle/lower classes become desperate and food becomes an issue that is when the knives come out.
“food becomes an issue”
Literally the first thing any Romanians mention to me about the late 80s, right before the revolution. Stores were empty and everyone was lining up for rations.
That is what I read about Weimar Germany. When the middle class found itself on a precipice that is when everyone became agitated.
They’re beginning to stir. The only thing they can do is passively resist and they’re becoming more aware of that each day.
Idk we’ve learned that American citizens don’t do shit all even when the boots on their neck.
Not true, there’s been lots of big talk, and some actual organization and resistance.
It’s taking time, but the wheels are already in motion.
Each day people feel like they have less to lose and nothing to live for. Crime will go up, productivity will go down.
China is going to lead the world because America is run by people who went to business school.
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.
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”).
Much would be solved if we were to eat one of them. I mean, it works for the chimpanzees…
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.
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.
I think more want to be “influencers” because they don’t have any relatives that can give them a small multi-million dollar loan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“Saying the quiet part out loud” moment, because they don’t feel like they need to be quiet. They’re untouchable.
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.
He is such a self-centered, megalomaniac cunt.
Nothing that cannot be solved by politically motivated violence.
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.
Can we replace CEOs and the wealthy with AI? They don’t do anything AI can’t do. Would there be any reason to let them keep massive wealth if they aren’t contributing anything?
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.
we need more progressive taxing, ultra-rich people shouldn’t exist, let them be rich, just not ultra-rich.
No billionaires until poverty is eradicated globally. And maybe not even then.
Nobody should have more wealth or income than a doctor.
Seems fair.
Yes. It’s so dumb that even the ultra rich have let it get this far.
I don’t think Thompson got up every morning thinking, “It’ll be neat when my kids cannot admit in public that they grieve for me, because my stupid needless death will be such a balm to the public for all of the other stupid needless death I am causing daily.”
Everyone can be a winner while we turn this mess around.
That said, I would still pay $20.00 for a chance to piss on Thompson’s grave. He chose his path.
People are not hungry enough for any kind of radical change. Media and the narrative is controlled by the ultra rich. That’s why for “regular” people socialism is a bad thing.
