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.”
Agreed with a lot of this, but
Lots of those people did get replaced already by technology, it was just called industrialization and assembly lines. What’s left now is artisan wood working and emergency repair work for plumbers and mechanics, and you can’t employ all of America’s blue collar workers with luxury stuff and emergencies.
Another thing that doesn’t get mentioned here - if AI and self driving cars work out like they want them to, goodbye delivery work and long haul trucking, which actually is a ton of blue collar jobs. Also, self checkout machines and chatbots are eating customer service jobs that less educated workers might otherwise be doing.
The biggest portion of blue collar jobs that will be tough to automate will be everything associated with construction just because they’re moving to different sites and jobs faster than it would take to get bots well trained to do that work, but if unemployment jumps and new home sales even look like they might slow down those jobs disappear fast.
My point is - if technology and labor rights get to the point the office workers are starting to feel the bite, guaranteed blue collar workers are all teeth marks by that point. Not that I would expect a CEO to talk honestly about that.
Again if you further take away there’s roles of drivers, reatails assistants who’s gonna have to money to pay for all the delivered goods? It will just strangle the economy.