- Amid the debate over AI’s impact on the workforce, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the technology can have an overall additive effect, “if we work very, very hard at it.” But he cautioned that if the industry doesn’t make that happen, the result could be “deep societal upheavals” that many elites are ignoring. There are already signs that AI is shrinking entry-level opportunities.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI revolution warned that the technology could also create massive fissures in society—unless the industry works hard to prevent them.
Alex Karp, CEO of data-mining software company Palantir, was asked on CNBC on Thursday about AI’s implications for employment.
“Those of us in tech cannot have a tin ear to what this is going to mean for the average person,” he replied.
That comes as AI increasingly gets incorporated into the daily tasks of workers, boosting their productivity and efficiency. At the same time, there are also signs that AI is shrinking opportunities for young workers in entry-level jobs that traditionally have been stepping stones for launching careers.
Meanwhile, Palantir has been at the forefront of using AI at the enterprise level. The company is known for putting its AI-powered platforms to work in the defense and intelligence sectors, but it has also been expanding in the commercial space. Most recently, it partnered with TeleTracking, a provider of operations platforms for hospitals and health systems.
On Thursday, Karp said the kind of AI that Palantir is doing can be “net accretive to the workforce in America,” but only if “we work very, very hard at it.”
He pointed out that just because it can happen, doesn’t mean it will happen. The industry has to make it so.
“We have to will it to be, because otherwise we’re going to have deep societal upheavals that I think many in our elite are just really ignoring,” Karp said.
The warning is especially notable coming from a leader in the AI field. But Karp has also urged the tech sector to take on bigger problems.
In a recent Atlantic essay adapted from their book The Technological Republic, Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO, blasted Silicon Valley for focusing on “trivial yet solvable inconveniences” and abandoning a long history of working with the government to tackle more pressing national issues.
Others in the AI field have also offered dire predictions about AI and the workforce lately. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
In an interview with Axios, he said that displacement could cause unemployment to spike to between 10% and 20%. The latest jobs report on Friday put the rate at 4.2%.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei said. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it … We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this past week that AI agents are like interns, predicting that in the next year they can “help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are very nontrivial.”
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference last month that while workers may not lose their jobs to AI, they will lose them to “someone who uses AI.”
