Alex Karp, CEO of one of the largest U.S. tech companies, warns about AI: “It will destroy humanities jobs”
Palantir and its leader emphasize the need for specialized skills in the face of AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently a tool that worries many people because they feel threatened in their jobs. Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, has reinforced these concerns with a statement: “It will destroy humanities jobs.”
He made this comment during a conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “You went to an elite school and you studied philosophy, I’ll use myself as an example, hopefully you have some other skill. That one is going to be hard to market.”
Karp appears pessimistic about the rise of AI, as he told Axios in November that if you are someone with broad but not specific knowledge, “You’re effed.”
“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” Karp reflected.
However, this is only one view among many. Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that his company is “going back to liberal arts degrees and saying, ‘Hey, let’s come back to some of the things that might have been deprioritized in the past to see if we can get a little bit more creativity,’” in order to move beyond AI’s linear problem-solving approach.
Vocational training
In this context, Karp has consistently defended vocational training over traditional college degrees. For that reason, he has launched a scholarship aimed at boosting employment.
This scholarship, called the Meritocratic Scholarship, offers high school students the opportunity to receive an interview for a paid full-time position.
The company believes that U.S. universities are focused on “indoctrinating” students and have opaque admissions processes that “displaced meritocracy and excellence.”
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