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.
“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.”
This technology is obviously going to hurt and is hurting working class men. The rest is true, though!
Not said there is that it’s also going to hurt white collar engineers, and it’s not through the ability of the technology itself, but rather the cover it provides to executives, not unlike what it does for the military when LLMs choose civilian targets for double tap strikes. The military already had plenty of technology for killing civilians via inaccurate targeting. The problem is that, before, they’d take the blame for using that technology. Now, there is a narrative that 1) A.I. is here to stay and 2) A.I. is to blame when you kill schoolchild. What are you going to do, use human judgment and contradict A.I.?
In software, huge masses of code that no one is checking (remember: it takes way more time to read code than to write code) is being generated by LLMs. CEOs do not give a shit whether it’s worse or not. They only care that they can replace people and reduce the leverage of the people that are left.
Anyway, back to Palantir: it’s not the technology that’s going to do the harm he’s talking about: it’s the capital that it covers for.