Alex Karp, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of the AI defense technology company Palantir, had a top humanities-based education.
Karp graduated from Haverford College, an elite liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, with a degree in philosophy. He then attended Stanford Law School and later earned a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory at a top German university.
“A very, very strong education,” Karp said during a panel at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday.
In the age of AI, that kind of academic trajectory will doom you, Karp told Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, who was leading the discussion.
AI “will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said.
“You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy — hopefully you have some other skill,” Karp said, because that skillset is going to be very hard to market.
The Palantir CEO said it would probably be possible for those with humanities backgrounds to keep a job once they secure it, but he said technicians and those with other vocational skill sets are going to be in the highest demand.
He gave the example of people building batteries for a battery company, saying that “they’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable, because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”
“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” Karp told Fink.
But not all at Davos agree with the tech leader’s assessment of the future of jobs.
Finance executives attending the global forum have been telling Business Insider’s Dan DeFrancesco that liberal arts degrees might be the new hot commodity. As AI takes on more of the hard financial analysis, it is transforming the skill set executives prioritize in young recruits. Critical creative thinkers are back in the spotlight.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also weighed in on jobs during a joint panel on Tuesday, saying that entry-level hiring at their companies was already declining due to AI.
Amodei said software and coding roles at Anthropic were down in both the junior and mid-levels of his company.
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