> “This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
Just a reminder, this guy has a PhD in "Neoclassical social theory".
Karp and Thiel are both proponents of "the Dark Enlightenment." It is a socio-political movement that backs, among other things, race-based slavery and gender based subjugation.
All I heard was “I’m saying words and sounding important. In fact the more important I sound the more shareholders and potential PE investors who have more money than sense will believe what I’m saying. Again, important words go here. Now give us money. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
I guess I'm missing something then, because I don't get what he's saying affecting his company's stock one way or another. I think the guy's spirit animal is the Mad Hatter, but what he's saying and how he's saying it is clearly a warning. He's saying AI is going to suck out the jobs of the majority of the educated middle class, who generally vote democratic, and that's going to impact the societal structure and direction of our country. Secondarily he's saying if these companies (which I'll infer are Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) don't, some other country/company will, and if it's another country, the outcome for the US will most likely be even worse.
I 100% believe we live in an oligarchy in the US, but to be glib or dismissive because of his role I feel is foolish. I think the risks he talks about are real and obvious, and we have no good solutions.
Thanks for this response, because it caused me to re-evaluate my initial response to what this person is saying. I at first thought he was crowing a bit, but you're saying he's describing an outcome, and that's an interesting angle to his provocative words (not intentionally, edgy-provocative).
Two things come to mind- there was a time, when unions were strong, that working class Americans voted Democratic. As someone with an MFA who works more in a blue-collarly, technician role, I long to bring vocations/trades back into an inclusive place instead of as roles that are looked down upon by white collar people. I'm a progressive who was fired for trying to unionize.
Secondly, I'd like to understand better exactly which humanities-trained positions are disrupted by this technology (not doubting it, just trying to get a sense of how or where specifically these disruptions will manifest). And if he's talking about like some corporate-style positions or like HR or something, I can't imagine those jobs are very interesting to begin with. Is he talking about management? I admit I haven't been paying close attention to where AI's impact will be felt.
Solid questions. I think we need unions to combat the power that large businesses wield whenever possible; thank you for your attempt. I'm not sure how unions will interact with AI encroachment; some positions will be safer for longer, I imagine.
This is all my speculation as a rando on the internet, so take it with plenty of salt. Karp didn't mention anything specifically, just that it would hit white collar workers hardest, and a greater majority of women go that route instead of blue collar/vocational work. I withhold judgement on how interesting or rewarding those jobs are.
Examples! I think AI can be targeted to specific domains well and is only getting better. Imagine Claude LMFT for all your therapy needs: it's very easy to talk to, could be trained on the latest cognitive behavioral research, etc. and cost $20/month instead of paying someone $200-300 per session. Insurance companies will love that too and funnel people there. What if we doubled or tripled classroom sizes and had every student individually taught by ProfessorGPT with one teacher to oversee/validate? It sounds awful, but public schools are always underfunded.
Already starting to feel it: paralegal, accounting assistant, entry-level graphic design or writing, are all currently a fraction of the cost of hiring a person, and they're getting better each iteration. There will possibly still be a place for a small portion of these careers in a "supervisor of AI output" role.
Higher competition for less openings will lead to reduced wages. Those people who see the writing on the wall and pursue vocational training will find a field flooded with others thinking the same thing, also driving down wage-earning potential. Separately, some careers like driving will be largely automated away, forcing those people into a shrinking labor pool. Poverty begets fear and tribalism.
I hope that I'm far off the mark and we as a world find new opportunities and meaning from this change.
Agreed. LLMs cost too much and consume too much power, but i assume we’ll see a rise of SLMs to solve that problem eventually. That said, if the LLM companies don’t pivot well or find a way to decrease their costs exponentially I imagine the market will tank first…
Exactly. It's a widely held belief (both among those who embrace it and who lament it) that the LLMs at the frontier of AI have the capacity to replace far more administrative/information-based jobs than physical, blue-collar jobs.
It’s also garbage analysis, disrupting a large class of workers does not lead to better outcomes for other workers, in fact often the opposite, the flood of new workers from other sectors depresses wages(which is what he wants but won’t say it). The only thing that sucked more than having a job during the Great Depression was not having one. Wages and working conditions worsened across the board for labor because the increased competition gave capital leverage.
Not to mention the college vs no college political divide isn’t as large as he is making it out to be. In 2024 college educated voters went for Harris 54:44, a decent divide but it’s hardly like college educated voters are a unified voting bloc, and I’m sure a lot of those Trump voting college educated people aren’t going to be happy with the administration that gloats about them losing their job.
He's pandering. He's not even saying what he thinks. He knows this isn't helping blue collar workers, just the hyper rich. Blue collar workers will just have more competition for even fewer jobs going forward.
I worked in a blue collar job for years before my current white collar job. A lot of blue collar workers don't care about making their lives better they want white collar workers to feel as bad as they do.
It's not going to increase the economic power of those "male" working class voters though. Private equity is going to make it impossible for them to work independently because billionaires are parasites.
Honestly it's a matter of time until people revolt. These morons think they have the tech to put it down, but they don't.
The frightening thing is how eerily effective they have become at suppressing real dissent. Someone has figured out how to totally emasculate the working class while preserving juuuust enough creature comforts that nobody gets too mad about it. I find that much scarier because it's so much more insidious than an old-school dictatorship.
He's right though. AI disproportionately threatens college graduates, white collar work, and technocratic government.
Sadly, these dopes want control of society and thinks trades are the key. Wipe out college grads however wipes out the trades too. Billionaires only need so many plumbers.
What gets me is that he's being so transparent about it. They are on the right because their technology is going to ruin the jobs of the left. These people are awful.
That labor doesn’t disappear though. If their apocalyptic vision of knowledge work holds (which is always up for debate), then the entire labor market is flooded.
AI will be just brutal on people whose entire skillset is "I know how to Google things really well", but AI is fundamentally unable to do actual acts of creativity: synthesis, analysis, building meaning, etc. This is why it's so obvious when you read an AI comment, or listen to AI music, or what have you - it feels paint-by-numbers. The jobs that are really at risk from AI are entry level jobs. Those jobs where you follow someone taking notes, or where you make meeting summaries, or where you write boilerplate. The same jobs that are already having trouble, and have since I entered the workforce. Companies don't want to pay people living wages to do this kind of work when they can outsource it to a remote assistant in the Philippines - or even better, to some AI chatbot.
But there's an even bigger problem here: those jobs are the jobs that train people in how to do the jobs that make a difference. You have to take a lot of notes, do a lot of template quality work, and generally fill space in order to get to the point where you understand the company well enough to do meaningfully creative work. Already we're seeing the fallout of similar policies. Through the 2000s and the 2010s a lot of entry level white collar work was outsourced or offshored. Now, companies are scrounging trying to find qualified people for mid-to-senior roles in their fields. However, because those companies weren't bringing people in to do the low-level paint-by-numbers stuff, the staff doesn't exist.
From your "reminder" it seems like you think the comment wasn't very smart. But it's a pretty widely held view that LLMs replace white collar jobs far more than they replace blue collar jobs. What in the comment do you disagree with?
I don’t think his fundamental assessment is wrong, many administrative and humanities roles are going to be eliminated while many roles society hasn’t rewarded economically or with prestige suddenly among the most desired roles. I don’t really know what the alternative is, AI seems inevitable
It really isn't. AI is a pattern recognition machine, it's really good at producing templatable work. It's a great replacement for, say, outsourced assistants, or entry level workers (if you are really short term oriented - which US business tends to be). If the only value you add to a company is doing the "dumb work" for someone else, then yeah AI is going to destroy your job.
Like yeah, it's going to replace secretaries. But you know what? That's a job that barely exists anymore anyways.
What in the hell is he talking about? For one thing, trying to split the working class into "humanities-trained voters" and "vocationally trained working-class voters" is insane. To start with, every worker that doesn't own their business is part of the working class. Don't ever let an oligarch make you see other workers as unlike you, no matter the wage or work.
Further, if what he means by "humanities-trained" is "higher paid, higher educated" people, that descriptor is not at all valid. There are dozens of major regions of higher learning and the fields that require it that don't touch the "humanities." This includes the very field he reaps his stolen wealth from, of course.
It's pretty nakedly obvious that he just wants to disenfranchise people working white collar jobs (which is close to an even split female-to-male), and by doing so, excite blue collar workers because Palantir is "hurting the right people." That and do a little sexist vice signalling to his Epstein Class buddies.
Don't worry, blue collar folks—he'll be stealing your money and having his tech oppress and jail you and your friends too.
Quite literally, there's no reason to think anything about Palantir's technology enhances or improves the blue collar worker's economic power. This just seems like a sop to cater to resentment but the actual truth is that the technology Palantir is building is designed to harm everyone that isn't already wealthy or well connected in the United States
He uses white working class voters as a sales pitch. He did it last year too talking about fentanyl. Let me say something slightly political, and I'm not saying other people agree with this, but when people are attacking our soldiers for stopping fentanyl from coming to this country, I want people to remember — if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working-class people, we'd be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America
Which first of all he doesn’t give a shit about those communities either. Second of all plenty of big cities have a massive problem with fent so his premise is flawed and finally his “solution” to the problem isnt community outreach or counseling or jobs support or anything like that, it’s purely kinetic, using palantir products of course. Somehow if we blow up enough columbian fishing boats the drug problem and the underlying issues that led to them will magically disappear. He is a disgusting human being.
AI is going to put a lot of the college educated demographic out of work. The safe ones will be guys working in trades. I’m pretty sure that is what he’s alluding to. He’s not wrong. The title implies some nefarious conspiracy when reality is good old fashioned destruction of jobs via technology.
What happens when all the desperate unemployed people start undercutting all the labor? You don't even have to get to the robots before the trades get fucked, too.
He said that this technology would enrich blue collar workers, not just imperil white collar workers. Of course, it won't, unless by blue collar you mean pipe fitters and contractors for the 29359354th data center we don't need.
The funny part with this idea is, what exactly do they think will happen to today's blue-collar workers if all those white collar people lose their jobs? Now you've got a wave of better educated people with with wide-ranging knowledge and skills flooding into the trades, eventually taking the best jobs. Soft hands get tough fast.
In every *other* country than the US with manufacturing, AI and AI development is being used for automation and robotics so that people can be freed up to do more intellectually intense activities than risking life and limb with the simpler machines.
But somehow, in the US, what we're saying is the opposite, that instead of *advancing* the realm of intellectual possibilities in the civilization by engaging people and their minds, *most* humans should be reduced into...more primitive machine-like activities? Isn't this....both morally regressive and culturally atavistic?
I’m not sure there is a clear consensus in the US. I do think what you are describing as atavistic is the Capital Class’s reaction to AI. They are clearly using it as a moat to concentrate wealth further at the top without regard to the morality of their actions. The first thing Fortune 500 CEOs did after agentic coding came on line was to layoff 10’s of thousands of people. They are constantly looking for ways to replace humans with AI.
Most regular people who have embraced it are using AI to create, innovate, and build. I see a gap, not a consistent philosophy or view.
That's true, it is the Capital Class reaction to AI and their endless very public insistence that that's the purpose of AI that's dissonant, along with all the layoffs with the excuse that its' due to AI rather than just...greed/bad business planning. I guess it makes no difference to them whether the floor is scrubbed with hands or machine as long as it's scrubbed, so to speak, but heavens forbid that *other* people might also have clean floors.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.
He’s just trying to politicize Palantir by suggesting that conservatives should support it. Because he’s afraid that they’ll realize it’s not in their interest to do so.
"These technologies are dangerous societally. The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries will do it. And we will be subject to their rule of law."
I sincerely cannot understand what he is talking about. Is he saying that if we don't create a surveillance state against American citizens that other countries will, and that would be bad, so we must therefore do it first?
Is he talking about AI in general? If so, how does AI impose any form of rule of law? I'm so confused.
"This guy in the bar may hit me in the face, but if I'm going to be hit in the face I'd rather do it on my own terms. Therefore I'm gonna hit myself in the face."
The argument assumes that AI will be the main thing that does all work in the future, so whoever wins the AI race will have all the money and power.
That is why people are piling so much money into the tech, to get a piece of the future money hoovering device.
Whether AI will live up to this hype is neither here nor there, because the upside, what ever the probability, is too big to miss out on. The downsides become irrelevant, when you know somebody will make it, might as well be you/us - people spending billions on data centers.
Ok. Makes sense. But if you are correct then he is lying to the audience. Which is almost guaranteed with this guy, so again it makes sense. In non-corpo speak the quote would be:
This technology is bad for society, especially everyday working people. But someone is going to eventually build it. So the future for normal people is bad no matter what. But as a rich guy I want to take a gamble that at least me and some other rich USA people can get richer while everyone else, American or not, fall.
Pretty much, it's just a battle to see who will profit off screwing over all the normal everyday folk. Any attempt to put some regulations in place to stop people getting screwed over is met with people saying "Do you want me to do it or China?"
...But I am very pessimistic about this stuff, so take my view with a pinch of salt.
Project 2025's end goal. Remake America into India or China. The "working class" will work 6 days a week, from 6 to 9 every day, for crap wages. Women are to be home "barefoot and pregnant" with no say in their lives . Sunday will be spent in a evangelical Christian megachurch. Everyone will be spoon-fed information that is needed to keep us all docile, worker bees.
Men have been waging war on women for more than 2 thousand years. They likely won't stop until they've murdered all life on the planet. They want to limit women's power so they can keep murdering and exploiting and destroying.
We're all stuck in a death spiral due to these freaks.
How can they? No real friends and a hired girlfriend/boyfriend(s). They suffer from the main character syndrome where they have to buy an audience knowing those applauses are fake.
I'm glad he exposed himself, but he doesn't beat the allegiance about billionaire villains. I can't watch 007 movies or Superman with Lex Luthor without feeling some type of way now.
He's just glazing Trumpets so they won't push for AI regulation. The Grand Oligarch Party is trying to create a new front in the culture war . By convincing dumb chudds that AI is good because it will only take those dirty librul jobs.
I’m guessing he is among the other TechBro billionaires who are building fancy apocalyptic bomb shelters to live in after they help bring the end of the world to fruition. The same dipshits who think they’ll be okay because they will have ex-special forces guys guarding them…and never consider that these same mercs will eventually get tired of their shit and just murder them and take all their shit.
Shocking to who? They are called tech bros for a reason. Seems to me if they were tech sis' the goals might be different, and definitely would be less misogynistic
Disrupt WHAT power? We are powerless. We lost all 3 branches of the federal government. Blue States are shrinking. Florida and Texas are growing. The SAVE act is the final nail in our coffin. They are just beating our dead corpse at this point.
Karp and Thiel are both proponents of "the Dark Enlightenment." It is a socio-political movement that backs, among other things, race-based slavery and gender based subjugation.
There's a guy, Gil Duran, who has been covering this stuff for a while. You can find him on bluesky, but he runs a newsletter and a podcast called Nerdreich. https://www.thenerdreich.com/
But he's been drawing attention to this for the last couple years and he's worth checking out b/c he's way ahead of the curve on this.
His main point is it's not just Palantir and Thiel. There's a whole ecosystem of these people that have been empowered by favorable treatment of tax laws to undermine our government.
Meanwhile, where are the Dems with a coherent and unified message on AI? This is a slam dunk to be against - it’s a massive bubble that will crash and hard, if even remotely successful it will put millions out of work, it makes you dumber as you rely on it more, it pollutes like nothing else, it poses an existential threat to freedom, and it is controlled by some of the worst people out on Earth.
Obligatory fuck you Karp and his scrapers reading this.
I also find his theory dead wrong. Let's just say for a second the guy knows what he thinks he wants to talk about. Given what's happening with AI today, they are actually seeking out the 'humanities trained '(ugh he can't even get his segmentation correct) to fine tune the models and if he thinks that's a temporary job he better be thinking about another set of models beyond transformers overall.
What AI and robotics have always threatened is the working class and blue collar jobs. Unless he specifically thinks autonomous robots building homes and paving roads is not a reality even today.
So here's why he's a classic turd - he's deliberately creating misleading talking points on calming the blue collar pitchforks by saying they're safe (and he knows the truth and he doesn't feel threatened) and instead focusing on the ones who are more confident in their ability to adapt to and choose new tools, democratic principles and socialist leaders because he knows they're the ones who can take his company out of circulation in a few years.
Nice one.
So he’s trying to sell AI powered surveillance and job loss by telling MAGA, “don’t worry, it’s only democrats jobs that will be eliminated by our technology. Your blue collar jobs are safe, so support Palantir”
soaero | 23 hours ago
> “This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
Just a reminder, this guy has a PhD in "Neoclassical social theory".
ideamotor | 23 hours ago
Sounds like the new “great books” masters at the new school of “civics” at t.u.
ibimacguru | 22 hours ago
So he has a degree about theoretical theories. Sounds Legit.
Terence_McKenna | 16 hours ago
They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
danisreallycool | an hour ago
Fantastic!
ModeInitial8990 | 8 hours ago
I wonder what his theory is on fire vs data centers? Seems to be the Achilles heel of his technology and we should to test this theory
Crowslikeme | 7 hours ago
I’d also like to test how well he eats when his jaw is wired shut because someone is tired of these evil fucks lol
Captain_Hobbes_19 | 8 hours ago
Greendale offers a degree in Theoretical Phys Ed
mistertickertape | 19 hours ago
He also LOVES talking to Nazi's. Much like his co-founder, Peter Thiel (who can not stfu about the antichrist) , he's a big fucking weirdo with a lot of money, a lot of power, and some really dark, backward ideas about the future of humanity.
Katerade44 | 3 hours ago
Karp and Thiel are both proponents of "the Dark Enlightenment." It is a socio-political movement that backs, among other things, race-based slavery and gender based subjugation.
IdleOsprey | 19 hours ago
He said WOMEN. Don’t forget that part.
Miserable_Boss6482 | 23 hours ago
All I heard was “I’m saying words and sounding important. In fact the more important I sound the more shareholders and potential PE investors who have more money than sense will believe what I’m saying. Again, important words go here. Now give us money. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
lucid_loris | 21 hours ago
I guess I'm missing something then, because I don't get what he's saying affecting his company's stock one way or another. I think the guy's spirit animal is the Mad Hatter, but what he's saying and how he's saying it is clearly a warning. He's saying AI is going to suck out the jobs of the majority of the educated middle class, who generally vote democratic, and that's going to impact the societal structure and direction of our country. Secondarily he's saying if these companies (which I'll infer are Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) don't, some other country/company will, and if it's another country, the outcome for the US will most likely be even worse.
I 100% believe we live in an oligarchy in the US, but to be glib or dismissive because of his role I feel is foolish. I think the risks he talks about are real and obvious, and we have no good solutions.
davidbklyn | 16 hours ago
Thanks for this response, because it caused me to re-evaluate my initial response to what this person is saying. I at first thought he was crowing a bit, but you're saying he's describing an outcome, and that's an interesting angle to his provocative words (not intentionally, edgy-provocative).
Two things come to mind- there was a time, when unions were strong, that working class Americans voted Democratic. As someone with an MFA who works more in a blue-collarly, technician role, I long to bring vocations/trades back into an inclusive place instead of as roles that are looked down upon by white collar people. I'm a progressive who was fired for trying to unionize.
Secondly, I'd like to understand better exactly which humanities-trained positions are disrupted by this technology (not doubting it, just trying to get a sense of how or where specifically these disruptions will manifest). And if he's talking about like some corporate-style positions or like HR or something, I can't imagine those jobs are very interesting to begin with. Is he talking about management? I admit I haven't been paying close attention to where AI's impact will be felt.
lucid_loris | 15 hours ago
Solid questions. I think we need unions to combat the power that large businesses wield whenever possible; thank you for your attempt. I'm not sure how unions will interact with AI encroachment; some positions will be safer for longer, I imagine.
This is all my speculation as a rando on the internet, so take it with plenty of salt. Karp didn't mention anything specifically, just that it would hit white collar workers hardest, and a greater majority of women go that route instead of blue collar/vocational work. I withhold judgement on how interesting or rewarding those jobs are.
Examples! I think AI can be targeted to specific domains well and is only getting better. Imagine Claude LMFT for all your therapy needs: it's very easy to talk to, could be trained on the latest cognitive behavioral research, etc. and cost $20/month instead of paying someone $200-300 per session. Insurance companies will love that too and funnel people there. What if we doubled or tripled classroom sizes and had every student individually taught by ProfessorGPT with one teacher to oversee/validate? It sounds awful, but public schools are always underfunded.
Already starting to feel it: paralegal, accounting assistant, entry-level graphic design or writing, are all currently a fraction of the cost of hiring a person, and they're getting better each iteration. There will possibly still be a place for a small portion of these careers in a "supervisor of AI output" role.
Higher competition for less openings will lead to reduced wages. Those people who see the writing on the wall and pursue vocational training will find a field flooded with others thinking the same thing, also driving down wage-earning potential. Separately, some careers like driving will be largely automated away, forcing those people into a shrinking labor pool. Poverty begets fear and tribalism.
I hope that I'm far off the mark and we as a world find new opportunities and meaning from this change.
TroAhWei | 19 hours ago
I had the same take. This is a legit possible outcome of widespread AI adoption, current wave of vaporware notwithstanding..
lucid_loris | 19 hours ago
Agreed. LLMs cost too much and consume too much power, but i assume we’ll see a rise of SLMs to solve that problem eventually. That said, if the LLM companies don’t pivot well or find a way to decrease their costs exponentially I imagine the market will tank first…
TroAhWei | 19 hours ago
It's the same as the dotcom bubble - the dinosaurs died out and the survivors rose from the ashes to turn everything they touch to shit.
grokmachine | 15 hours ago
Exactly. It's a widely held belief (both among those who embrace it and who lament it) that the LLMs at the frontier of AI have the capacity to replace far more administrative/information-based jobs than physical, blue-collar jobs.
goodb1b13 | 16 hours ago
So, the Jordan Peterson of CEOs?
SpezLuvsNazis | 20 hours ago
It’s also garbage analysis, disrupting a large class of workers does not lead to better outcomes for other workers, in fact often the opposite, the flood of new workers from other sectors depresses wages(which is what he wants but won’t say it). The only thing that sucked more than having a job during the Great Depression was not having one. Wages and working conditions worsened across the board for labor because the increased competition gave capital leverage.
Not to mention the college vs no college political divide isn’t as large as he is making it out to be. In 2024 college educated voters went for Harris 54:44, a decent divide but it’s hardly like college educated voters are a unified voting bloc, and I’m sure a lot of those Trump voting college educated people aren’t going to be happy with the administration that gloats about them losing their job.
Khatib | 4 hours ago
He's pandering. He's not even saying what he thinks. He knows this isn't helping blue collar workers, just the hyper rich. Blue collar workers will just have more competition for even fewer jobs going forward.
pepper_steak_hamill | 48 minutes ago
I worked in a blue collar job for years before my current white collar job. A lot of blue collar workers don't care about making their lives better they want white collar workers to feel as bad as they do.
Outsider-Trading | 4 hours ago
> the flood of new workers from other sectors depresses wages
Does that also apply to workers from other countries?
12PoundCankles | 21 hours ago
It's not going to increase the economic power of those "male" working class voters though. Private equity is going to make it impossible for them to work independently because billionaires are parasites.
Honestly it's a matter of time until people revolt. These morons think they have the tech to put it down, but they don't.
TroAhWei | 19 hours ago
The frightening thing is how eerily effective they have become at suppressing real dissent. Someone has figured out how to totally emasculate the working class while preserving juuuust enough creature comforts that nobody gets too mad about it. I find that much scarier because it's so much more insidious than an old-school dictatorship.
12PoundCankles | 19 hours ago
They've likely modeled this whole scenario using AI. So we have to make ourselves unpredictable.
shatterdaymorn | 19 hours ago
He's right though. AI disproportionately threatens college graduates, white collar work, and technocratic government.
Sadly, these dopes want control of society and thinks trades are the key. Wipe out college grads however wipes out the trades too. Billionaires only need so many plumbers.
What gets me is that he's being so transparent about it. They are on the right because their technology is going to ruin the jobs of the left. These people are awful.
cornholio2240 | 18 hours ago
That labor doesn’t disappear though. If their apocalyptic vision of knowledge work holds (which is always up for debate), then the entire labor market is flooded.
shatterdaymorn | 16 hours ago
They know they are gonna ruin lives and the align their politics to match their power play. Depraved elites are gonna deprave elitely.
Khatib | 4 hours ago
> He's right though. AI disproportionately threatens college graduates, white collar work, and technocratic government.
He's not though, because you cut off right before his big lie that this will enrich blue collar workers. It won't.
> What gets me is that he's being so transparent about it.
Because he's not. It's propaganda. He's lying to the working class to hold power long enough that they will be too entrenched to lose it.
shatterdaymorn | 3 hours ago
Your right. They know their stuff is gonna collapse Technocracy.
He just said it out loud cause he doesn't think it can be stopped.
soaero | 3 hours ago
Not really.
AI will be just brutal on people whose entire skillset is "I know how to Google things really well", but AI is fundamentally unable to do actual acts of creativity: synthesis, analysis, building meaning, etc. This is why it's so obvious when you read an AI comment, or listen to AI music, or what have you - it feels paint-by-numbers. The jobs that are really at risk from AI are entry level jobs. Those jobs where you follow someone taking notes, or where you make meeting summaries, or where you write boilerplate. The same jobs that are already having trouble, and have since I entered the workforce. Companies don't want to pay people living wages to do this kind of work when they can outsource it to a remote assistant in the Philippines - or even better, to some AI chatbot.
But there's an even bigger problem here: those jobs are the jobs that train people in how to do the jobs that make a difference. You have to take a lot of notes, do a lot of template quality work, and generally fill space in order to get to the point where you understand the company well enough to do meaningfully creative work. Already we're seeing the fallout of similar policies. Through the 2000s and the 2010s a lot of entry level white collar work was outsourced or offshored. Now, companies are scrounging trying to find qualified people for mid-to-senior roles in their fields. However, because those companies weren't bringing people in to do the low-level paint-by-numbers stuff, the staff doesn't exist.
grokmachine | 15 hours ago
From your "reminder" it seems like you think the comment wasn't very smart. But it's a pretty widely held view that LLMs replace white collar jobs far more than they replace blue collar jobs. What in the comment do you disagree with?
CalmHovercraft9465 | 3 hours ago
I don’t think his fundamental assessment is wrong, many administrative and humanities roles are going to be eliminated while many roles society hasn’t rewarded economically or with prestige suddenly among the most desired roles. I don’t really know what the alternative is, AI seems inevitable
soaero | 2 hours ago
It really isn't. AI is a pattern recognition machine, it's really good at producing templatable work. It's a great replacement for, say, outsourced assistants, or entry level workers (if you are really short term oriented - which US business tends to be). If the only value you add to a company is doing the "dumb work" for someone else, then yeah AI is going to destroy your job.
Like yeah, it's going to replace secretaries. But you know what? That's a job that barely exists anymore anyways.
parsimonious | 23 hours ago
What in the hell is he talking about? For one thing, trying to split the working class into "humanities-trained voters" and "vocationally trained working-class voters" is insane. To start with, every worker that doesn't own their business is part of the working class. Don't ever let an oligarch make you see other workers as unlike you, no matter the wage or work.
Further, if what he means by "humanities-trained" is "higher paid, higher educated" people, that descriptor is not at all valid. There are dozens of major regions of higher learning and the fields that require it that don't touch the "humanities." This includes the very field he reaps his stolen wealth from, of course.
It's pretty nakedly obvious that he just wants to disenfranchise people working white collar jobs (which is close to an even split female-to-male), and by doing so, excite blue collar workers because Palantir is "hurting the right people." That and do a little sexist vice signalling to his Epstein Class buddies.
Don't worry, blue collar folks—he'll be stealing your money and having his tech oppress and jail you and your friends too.
jetpacksforall | 22 hours ago
Vice signaling, I've been needing a term like that to describe the Trump era.
silverum | 21 hours ago
Quite literally, there's no reason to think anything about Palantir's technology enhances or improves the blue collar worker's economic power. This just seems like a sop to cater to resentment but the actual truth is that the technology Palantir is building is designed to harm everyone that isn't already wealthy or well connected in the United States
SpezLuvsNazis | 19 hours ago
He uses white working class voters as a sales pitch. He did it last year too talking about fentanyl. Let me say something slightly political, and I'm not saying other people agree with this, but when people are attacking our soldiers for stopping fentanyl from coming to this country, I want people to remember — if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working-class people, we'd be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America
Which first of all he doesn’t give a shit about those communities either. Second of all plenty of big cities have a massive problem with fent so his premise is flawed and finally his “solution” to the problem isnt community outreach or counseling or jobs support or anything like that, it’s purely kinetic, using palantir products of course. Somehow if we blow up enough columbian fishing boats the drug problem and the underlying issues that led to them will magically disappear. He is a disgusting human being.
General_Tso75 | 21 hours ago
AI is going to put a lot of the college educated demographic out of work. The safe ones will be guys working in trades. I’m pretty sure that is what he’s alluding to. He’s not wrong. The title implies some nefarious conspiracy when reality is good old fashioned destruction of jobs via technology.
Organic_Pick3616 | 19 hours ago
What happens when robots become advanced enough to replace most trade workers?
Khatib | 4 hours ago
What happens when all the desperate unemployed people start undercutting all the labor? You don't even have to get to the robots before the trades get fucked, too.
Organic_Pick3616 | 3 hours ago
I'm sure about that.
General_Tso75 | 18 hours ago
Then it’s their turn in the barrel.
parsimonious | 19 hours ago
He said that this technology would enrich blue collar workers, not just imperil white collar workers. Of course, it won't, unless by blue collar you mean pipe fitters and contractors for the 29359354th data center we don't need.
The funny part with this idea is, what exactly do they think will happen to today's blue-collar workers if all those white collar people lose their jobs? Now you've got a wave of better educated people with with wide-ranging knowledge and skills flooding into the trades, eventually taking the best jobs. Soft hands get tough fast.
Appropriate_M | 17 hours ago
In every *other* country than the US with manufacturing, AI and AI development is being used for automation and robotics so that people can be freed up to do more intellectually intense activities than risking life and limb with the simpler machines.
But somehow, in the US, what we're saying is the opposite, that instead of *advancing* the realm of intellectual possibilities in the civilization by engaging people and their minds, *most* humans should be reduced into...more primitive machine-like activities? Isn't this....both morally regressive and culturally atavistic?
General_Tso75 | 15 hours ago
I’m not sure there is a clear consensus in the US. I do think what you are describing as atavistic is the Capital Class’s reaction to AI. They are clearly using it as a moat to concentrate wealth further at the top without regard to the morality of their actions. The first thing Fortune 500 CEOs did after agentic coding came on line was to layoff 10’s of thousands of people. They are constantly looking for ways to replace humans with AI.
Most regular people who have embraced it are using AI to create, innovate, and build. I see a gap, not a consistent philosophy or view.
Appropriate_M | 14 hours ago
That's true, it is the Capital Class reaction to AI and their endless very public insistence that that's the purpose of AI that's dissonant, along with all the layoffs with the excuse that its' due to AI rather than just...greed/bad business planning. I guess it makes no difference to them whether the floor is scrubbed with hands or machine as long as it's scrubbed, so to speak, but heavens forbid that *other* people might also have clean floors.
[OP] PixeledPathogen | a day ago
Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.
romeo_pentium | 23 hours ago
Anti-intellectualism as a service
gaoshan | 22 hours ago
He really just means it will help exacerbate the rich/poor divide and help provide a compliant working class for the wealthy to continue to exploit.
ShortWoman | 22 hours ago
Meanwhile a few million nurses are giving a collective side eye.
mycenae42 | 17 hours ago
He’s just trying to politicize Palantir by suggesting that conservatives should support it. Because he’s afraid that they’ll realize it’s not in their interest to do so.
moh_kohn | 23 hours ago
Funny how he thinks men do all the physical labour. Visit a care home or hospital mate.
RektInTheHed | 23 hours ago
"working class" only means job with wrench. he has a billionaire's understanding of physical labor. I.e. none.
Appropriate_M | 17 hours ago
Or just know who keeps his houses habitable....
Madmartigan____ | 23 hours ago
That means he’s an enemy of the American people
Bawbawian | 22 hours ago
that's a bingo
CornerHugger | 23 hours ago
"These technologies are dangerous societally. The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries will do it. And we will be subject to their rule of law."
I sincerely cannot understand what he is talking about. Is he saying that if we don't create a surveillance state against American citizens that other countries will, and that would be bad, so we must therefore do it first?
Is he talking about AI in general? If so, how does AI impose any form of rule of law? I'm so confused.
jetpacksforall | 22 hours ago
"This guy in the bar may hit me in the face, but if I'm going to be hit in the face I'd rather do it on my own terms. Therefore I'm gonna hit myself in the face."
Throwing_Daze | 22 hours ago
The argument assumes that AI will be the main thing that does all work in the future, so whoever wins the AI race will have all the money and power.
That is why people are piling so much money into the tech, to get a piece of the future money hoovering device.
Whether AI will live up to this hype is neither here nor there, because the upside, what ever the probability, is too big to miss out on. The downsides become irrelevant, when you know somebody will make it, might as well be you/us - people spending billions on data centers.
CornerHugger | 21 hours ago
Ok. Makes sense. But if you are correct then he is lying to the audience. Which is almost guaranteed with this guy, so again it makes sense. In non-corpo speak the quote would be:
This technology is bad for society, especially everyday working people. But someone is going to eventually build it. So the future for normal people is bad no matter what. But as a rich guy I want to take a gamble that at least me and some other rich USA people can get richer while everyone else, American or not, fall.
Throwing_Daze | 20 hours ago
Pretty much, it's just a battle to see who will profit off screwing over all the normal everyday folk. Any attempt to put some regulations in place to stop people getting screwed over is met with people saying "Do you want me to do it or China?"
...But I am very pessimistic about this stuff, so take my view with a pinch of salt.
romeo_pentium | 23 hours ago
Anti-intellectualism as a service
bliceroquququq | 22 hours ago
"Democratic power" here does not refer to democracy, it refers to the Democrats as a political party.
cpepinc | 23 hours ago
Project 2025's end goal. Remake America into India or China. The "working class" will work 6 days a week, from 6 to 9 every day, for crap wages. Women are to be home "barefoot and pregnant" with no say in their lives . Sunday will be spent in a evangelical Christian megachurch. Everyone will be spoon-fed information that is needed to keep us all docile, worker bees.
travistravis | 22 hours ago
And we'll be expected to give any of our leftover money (if there ever is any) directly to the church
Jasonrj | 13 hours ago
Some women will have to be sex workers with no say in their lives.
hodgeman29 | 22 hours ago
These people do not deserve to have power or even their lives at this point.
johnny_mcd | 22 hours ago
Luigi
notyourstranger | 23 hours ago
Men have been waging war on women for more than 2 thousand years. They likely won't stop until they've murdered all life on the planet. They want to limit women's power so they can keep murdering and exploiting and destroying.
We're all stuck in a death spiral due to these freaks.
hanhanbanan | 22 hours ago
Fuck this absolute knob.
Green-Size-7475 | 22 hours ago
Don’t these people have anything better to do?! Hang out with friends, go to a movie, travel? 🙄
CalebAsimov | 20 hours ago
All the money for a big ass super yacht, but not enough sense to enjoy it.
Umberto12345 | 18 hours ago
How can they? No real friends and a hired girlfriend/boyfriend(s). They suffer from the main character syndrome where they have to buy an audience knowing those applauses are fake.
Umberto12345 | 18 hours ago
I'm glad he exposed himself, but he doesn't beat the allegiance about billionaire villains. I can't watch 007 movies or Superman with Lex Luthor without feeling some type of way now.
magrandan | 17 hours ago
It’s sad that our sun has another 5-6 billion years left, can’t it explode sooner?
Furcheezi | 16 hours ago
We need a hero cough LUIGI cough
winkler456 | 15 hours ago
So AI will take all the good jobs and leave the back breaking labor to humans? What a breakthrough!
Tough_Papaya_4167 | 22 hours ago
seems a bit exaggerated maybe
_ECMO_ | 22 hours ago
If you find that even just a little bit shocking you weren't paying attention over the last years.
km415 | 22 hours ago
One transformational technology that hasn’t changed is the guillotine. We should look into it.
A_Beautiful_Impact | 18 hours ago
[ Removed by Reddit ]
Cold_Specialist_3656 | 18 hours ago
He's just glazing Trumpets so they won't push for AI regulation. The Grand Oligarch Party is trying to create a new front in the culture war . By convincing dumb chudds that AI is good because it will only take those dirty librul jobs.
It's coming for all our jobs.
Dependent-Break5324 | 16 hours ago
His ideas are silly, if AI replaces jobs that lowers gdp and the economy suffers. Blue collar workers suffer equally.
Crusoebear | 15 hours ago
I’m guessing he is among the other TechBro billionaires who are building fancy apocalyptic bomb shelters to live in after they help bring the end of the world to fruition. The same dipshits who think they’ll be okay because they will have ex-special forces guys guarding them…and never consider that these same mercs will eventually get tired of their shit and just murder them and take all their shit.
LegitimateQuit194 | 14 hours ago
This guy must be the life of the party. He seems like a petulant little thing.
Sucih | 14 hours ago
Ai bubble must be bear bursting then
Ironclad_Cat_1773 | 12 hours ago
Shocking to who? They are called tech bros for a reason. Seems to me if they were tech sis' the goals might be different, and definitely would be less misogynistic
BurningJointUSA | 9 hours ago
That reminds me, has Luigi been released yet?
8282FergasaurusRexx | 9 hours ago
Disrupt WHAT power? We are powerless. We lost all 3 branches of the federal government. Blue States are shrinking. Florida and Texas are growing. The SAVE act is the final nail in our coffin. They are just beating our dead corpse at this point.
tlhsg | 8 hours ago
needs to be punished
BroItsMick | 7 hours ago
Just in: Nobody is shocked.
Wingzerofyf | 5 hours ago
He's basically saying, from his perspective "get fucked sjw/woman you can't stop me."
It people like him that make shit garbage - movies suck, games suck, music is shit.
Why? Cause this asshole wanted a bonus
I look forward to pissing on his grave. I'm taking a shit on Peter Thiel's.
supernova_tiger | 4 hours ago
The wrong people are given resources.
fox_mulder | 3 hours ago
I once knew another guy named Karp, and he was an asshole, too.
Lariat_Advance1984 | 3 hours ago
Someone who also needs to be on Luigi’s list. Certainly on Arya Stark’s list.
Katerade44 | 3 hours ago
Karp and Thiel are both proponents of "the Dark Enlightenment." It is a socio-political movement that backs, among other things, race-based slavery and gender based subjugation.
elmonoenano | 2 hours ago
There's a guy, Gil Duran, who has been covering this stuff for a while. You can find him on bluesky, but he runs a newsletter and a podcast called Nerdreich. https://www.thenerdreich.com/
But he's been drawing attention to this for the last couple years and he's worth checking out b/c he's way ahead of the curve on this.
His main point is it's not just Palantir and Thiel. There's a whole ecosystem of these people that have been empowered by favorable treatment of tax laws to undermine our government.
sweetcomputerdragon | 44 minutes ago
You're not the market that he's appealing to..
Awkward-Fox-7215 | 21 hours ago
Meanwhile, where are the Dems with a coherent and unified message on AI? This is a slam dunk to be against - it’s a massive bubble that will crash and hard, if even remotely successful it will put millions out of work, it makes you dumber as you rely on it more, it pollutes like nothing else, it poses an existential threat to freedom, and it is controlled by some of the worst people out on Earth.
violent_unicorn | 21 hours ago
Obligatory fuck you Karp and his scrapers reading this.
I also find his theory dead wrong. Let's just say for a second the guy knows what he thinks he wants to talk about. Given what's happening with AI today, they are actually seeking out the 'humanities trained '(ugh he can't even get his segmentation correct) to fine tune the models and if he thinks that's a temporary job he better be thinking about another set of models beyond transformers overall. What AI and robotics have always threatened is the working class and blue collar jobs. Unless he specifically thinks autonomous robots building homes and paving roads is not a reality even today.
So here's why he's a classic turd - he's deliberately creating misleading talking points on calming the blue collar pitchforks by saying they're safe (and he knows the truth and he doesn't feel threatened) and instead focusing on the ones who are more confident in their ability to adapt to and choose new tools, democratic principles and socialist leaders because he knows they're the ones who can take his company out of circulation in a few years. Nice one.
amapanda | 21 hours ago
Is anyone else.... Not shocked?
willismthomp | 21 hours ago
What do we do to evil men my fellow humans? We have to make some decisions and cannot expect the establishment to do it for us.
Emotional_Database53 | 21 hours ago
So he’s trying to sell AI powered surveillance and job loss by telling MAGA, “don’t worry, it’s only democrats jobs that will be eliminated by our technology. Your blue collar jobs are safe, so support Palantir”
SurinamPam | 19 hours ago
Is he stating that his company is putting intentionally biased systems in the US government?
Curious_Maximum_639 | 21 hours ago
ABAE All Billionaires Are Evil
Expensive-Worth9249 | 21 hours ago
I think the plan is civil war at this point.