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.
Fine. Plumber $800 an hour. Want food? A carrot for $70. Our society can let the rich win and split into a working class economy where working folks charge working folks wages for goods and services.
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.
Did he not see that amazing South Park episode where manual workers became top dogs?
Can someone take this insufferable prick out back with a shotgun already?
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.
peasant hands can hold guns
Posting clickbait is almost as bad as writing clickbait.
We want to be informed, not have our emotions manipulated for ad revenue.
Then do what I do, just read the title and get mad for free.
Not him, though. He’s a different class of human that isn’t like us plebeians.
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.
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.
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.
Whenever any one of these assholes opens their yap in public, the only response they should hear back is, “You need us. We don’t need you. Shut the fuck up.”
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.
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.
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.
Just … please.
I beg ANYONE … if you see billionaires getting lynched in the streets, FILM IT!
I wanna put some funny Benny HIll music on a video of people chasing Elon around with a pitchforks and torches and eventually getting him.
Imagine seeing Larry Fink from Blackrock with horses tied to his arms and legs and run in four different directions and having The Final Countdown play, and watch him turn into red mist when the best drops hard.
Or Dontard Dump dropped into a large woodchipper with “you spin me right round baby” playing as the razor sharp teeth spin.
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”
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.
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”
At that point they’re just the responsibility circuit breaker, put there to get the blame if things go wrong.
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.
A healthy chuck of CEOs have a humanities degree. It’s a common undergrad before moving to B and J-School.
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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.
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He deserves to go like Ghaddafi did
Why do we tolerate these people?
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.
The system has evolved and is designed to make people obey the ruling class.
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.
“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.
The best you and I can do is to look out for each other, our friends and family and help anyone else that manages to escape the pot as quickly as possible so they don’t get back in…
My thoughts are that people are animals and they’ll follow where the majority go, so keep helping others escape the pot and eventually, more will notice there is an exit option and jump as well.
At the moment, I see this as the only real answer. Until there’s proper organization and resistance, everything is lip service.
Mobilization is easy - the protests and marches get people together in solidarity. But organization takes effort: it takes talking to people, getting numbers/contact info, making plans and deciding what’s next…
This doesn’t happen in a bubble though. We need those people too. We need each other.
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.
Powerless?
Or is it learned helplessness?
Yeah right. Almost half the people I talk to are not happy but are burning their heads in the sand and waiting/hoping for this to blow over. It can’t happen here and all that.
Agreed. We’re partially awake.
Really feeling the victim blaming here when they made the devices into virtual heroine
*heroin
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
Well done! I remember that song fondly.
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!
Thanks for the link, I just read through the foreward to Amusing Ourselves to Death and am looking forward to the full book.
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In other words, a slave wants to have their own slaves, instead of being free.
I know you don’t necessarily mean it this way, but there’s a very interesting (and infuriating) history to why the US reveres the wealthy. The short version is that the ultra wealthy were pissed about the New Deal, so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh.
We will have to overcome that idea if we hope to gain real class consciousness.
Makes sense for the overdrive push on the Christianity angle. It’s just obnoxious to someone who’s going pretty damn secular.
The short version is that the ultra wealthy were pissed about the New Deal, so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh.
That concept existed WAY before the United State did.
The old idea was kings were rich because they were ordained to be kings by god. Questioning why the king was rich was questioning the word of god and punishable by death.
Sure, but why it exists today in the US is a direct result of the robber barons’ influence in the early 1900s. The core idea isn’t new, but this instance is.
Early colonized America used slave labor by racist christians. Those racist christians said they were supposed to be rich because god made them that way. That predates the robber barons of the early 1900s.
Great, congrats. You are today’s biggest pedant. Here’s your prize.
That dude is a knowitall jackass that doesn’t know much at all actually.
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Pray tell, how do you stop them?
I don’t want to get banned for answering this.
How ironic
Mario has a brother, who I’ve heard of recently.
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.
nice try, uncle sam.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
