When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All Palantir CEO Alex Karp has is AI, and boy, is he ready to nail some things down with it.
During an appearance at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Karp sat down with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to create a nightmare blunt rotation: two guys who are heavily invested in the military industrial complex and surveillance industry, talking about how great those things are for society. Karp, as he is wont to do lately, made some outlandish statements throughout the half-hour conversation, but perhaps none more eye-popping than his barely complete thought that AI will create so many jobs that there will basically be no reason for anyone to ever immigrate to another country.
Asked if AI will destroy or create jobs, Karp started answering the question in a roundabout ramble about how white-collar jobs will get hit, and vocational jobs will thrive. Then, after stating, “Not to diverge into one of my political screeds,” he proceeded to diverge into one of his political screeds. “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training. I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill,” he said.
There are, of course, many reasons that people leave their home country to try to start a life somewhere else, other than job seeking; from political instability and war to environmental dangers (*cough AI*). And there are, of course, many reasons that a country might want to accept immigrants other than the fact that they could contribute to the economy—like, for instance, believing it a moral imperative to accept people fleeing from political persecution, especially when it was American meddling in foreign affairs that greatly contributed to that instability in the first place.
Karp, who at least managed to stay in his seat for the majority of the interview this time, had a lot to say about a lot of things, most seemingly unconnected from whatever the original prompt was. In response to a question about whether the future will require fewer white-collar workers, he somehow landed on his engineers recommending that he stop speaking in public. Obviously, he didn’t take that advice.
The incoherence was on full display throughout, with strange asides about how, despite his seeming distaste for higher education, he dreams of going back to grad school—but not for the education, just for the “fun.” At one point, he noted that one of the heads of Palantir’s Maven system, an AI tool meant to be used on the battlefield by the US Army, only completed junior college and declared that he probably didn’t even need that. “Would they been as talented if they had not gone to their college? Yes,” he said, as if whatever talent or intelligence the person has is simply inherent.
Maybe Karp believes he truly didn’t pick up any skills through university and was not in any way influenced in how to think, communicate, or understand the world, and he would have come out exactly the same as he is now without setting foot in school. Given that he has a PhD in philosophy, it probably says more about him than his education if he went through all of that coursework without ever challenging his own beliefs.
Trying to piece together Karp’s ideas and ideology is a fool’s errand. The thing that seems like he most clearly believes is that he should be successful and rich, and the world should go along with what leads to that outcome.
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