Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), as robots can do much of the heavy lifting in coding or research. Take Brandeis economics professor Benjamin Shiller as an example; recently told wealth The labor market of the future will value the “weird premium.” Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp is not one of those voices.
Asked how artificial intelligence will affect human employment, Karp said: “It will destroy humanities jobs.” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “You go to an elite school, study philosophy – and I’ll use myself as an example – and hopefully you have some other skill set, but that skill set is hard to sell.”
Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. PhD in Philosophy from Goethe University, Germany. He talked about his experience getting his first job.
Karp told Funk that he remembers thinking about his career, “I wasn’t sure who was going to give me my first job.”
The answer echoes in the past Comment Karp describes certain elite college graduates who lack professional skills.
“If you’re the kind of person who goes to Yale, typically with a high IQ, and you have general knowledge but not specific knowledge, you’re going to get frustrated,” Karp says in the book. interview and Axios November.
Not all CEOs agree with Karp’s assessment that humanities degrees are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein Tell wealth In 2024, the company is recruiting graduates studying “something not related to finance or technology”.
McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview Harvard Business Review The company is “focusing more on liberal arts majors, which we had viewed as potential sources of creativity” to move beyond AI’s linear problem-solving approach.
Karp has long advocated for job training rather than a traditional college degree. Last year, Palantir roll out Elite scholarship that provides high school students with a paid internship and the opportunity to interview for a full-time position after four months.
The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and “opaque” admissions, which “replace meritocracy and excellence.” announcement of fellowship.
“If you didn’t go to school, or you went to a not-so-good school, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantir—no one cares about the rest,” Karp During the period one Q2 Last year’s earnings call.
“I think we need a different approach to testing ability,” Karp told Fink. He points to a former police officer who attended junior college and now runs the U.S. Army’s MAVEN system, an artificial intelligence tool made by Palantir that processes drone imagery and video.
“In the past, the way we tested ability didn’t fully expose how irreplaceable that person’s talent was,” he said.
Karp also gave the example of technicians at a battery company who make batteries, saying these workers are “extremely valuable, if not irreplaceable, because we can quickly make them into something different than what they originally were.”
He said what he does throughout the day at Palantir is “identify someone’s unusual talent. Then I get them to do that thing and try to get them to stay at that thing rather than the five other things they think they’re good at.”
Karp’s comments come as a growing number of employers report that gap The relationship between the skills offered by applicants and the skills employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate among young workers aged 16 to 24 reached 10.4% in 2019 December and is grow among college graduates. Cap wasn’t too worried.
“Enough job opportunities will be provided for the citizens of your country, especially those who have received vocational training,” he said.