{"id":374661,"date":"2026-04-11T14:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/374661\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T14:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:42:13","slug":"palantir-ceo-says-ai-will-destroy-humanities-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/374661\/","title":{"rendered":"Palantir CEO says AI ‘will destroy’ humanities jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, when an LLM can do much of the heavy lifting in coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune<\/a> a \u201cweirdness premium\u201d will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, the Palantir cofounder and CEO, isn\u2019t one of these voices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will destroy humanities jobs,\u201d Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock<\/a> CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum\u2019s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. \u201cYou went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy\u2014I\u2019ll use myself as an example\u2014hopefully, you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of his own career, Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking: \u201cI\u2019m not sure who\u2019s going to give me my first job.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The comments echoed past remarks<\/a> Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are the kind of person that would\u2019ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it\u2019s not specific, you\u2019re effed,\u201d Karp said in an interview<\/a> with Axios in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI will devastate liberal arts careers\u2014here\u2019s who he thinks will thrive<\/p>\n

Karp recently expanded on his predictions for who is best prepared for the AI era.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are basically two ways to know you have a future,\u201d the 58-year-old billionaire\u00a0said on\u00a0TBPN<\/a>\u00a0on March 12. \u201cOne, you have some vocational training. Or two, you\u2019re neurodivergent.\u201d Karp has credited his own dyslexia<\/a>, a learning disability that can affect reading, writing, and information processing, for Palantir\u2019s success. More broadly,\u00a0neurodivergence<\/a>\u00a0can include conditions such as ADHD and autism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karp also predicted large-scale disruption for humanities graduates, Democratic voters, and women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis technology disrupts humanities trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the power, economic power, vocationally trained, working class, often male voters, and, and, and so, these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society,\u201d he told<\/a> CNBC.<\/p>\n

Not every CEO agrees with Karp\u2019s assessment that humanities graduates are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told<\/a> Fortune in 2024 the company was recruiting graduates who studied \u201cthings that have nothing to do with finance or technology.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

McKinsey<\/a> global managing partner Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review the company is \u201clooking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,\u201d to break out of AI\u2019s linear problem-solving.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karp has long been an advocate of vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched<\/a> a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with the chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The company criticized American universities for \u201cindoctrinating\u201d students and having \u201copaque\u201d admissions that \u201cdisplaced meritocracy and excellence,\u201d in their announcement<\/a> of the fellowship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you did not go to school, or you went to a school that\u2019s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you\u2019re a Palantirian\u2014no one cares about the other stuff,\u201d Karp said during<\/a> a Q2<\/a> earnings call last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we need different ways of testing aptitude,\u201d Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the U.S. Army\u2019s Maven system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person\u2019s talents are,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are \u201cvery valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said what he does all day at Palantir is \u201cfiguring out what is someone\u2019s outlier aptitude. Then I\u2019m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they\u2019re great at.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Karp\u2019s comments come as more employers report a gap<\/a> between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December<\/a> and is growing<\/a> among college graduates. Karp isn\u2019t too worried, though.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,\u201d he said.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on January 20, 2026.<\/p>\n

More on the future of work:<\/p>\n

Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha think AI <\/a>can make middle management obsolete\u00a0. <\/p>\n

Ford CEO Jim Farley says America is sleepwalking<\/a> past its \u2018essential economy\u2019 crisis. <\/p>\n

Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang\u2019s advice to workers scared of AI. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,4038,138198,119594,232,34199,111,139,69,7714,16708,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-374661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-colleges-and-universities","12":"tag-davos","13":"tag-evergreen-refresh","14":"tag-jobs","15":"tag-larry-fink","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz","19":"tag-palantir","20":"tag-skills","21":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}