Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, recently said that AI technology “disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less.”
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” — Dean Vernon Wormer, “Animal House” (1978)
OK, so the fictional dean of Faber College could be a bit of a fascist at times, but nonetheless Dean Wormer’s dressing down of Flounder, the everyman fraternity pledge, did a pretty good job conveying the ethos of Animal House’s setting in 1962, the golden age of college in America.
The Industrial Revolution was ending, the “knowledge economy” was about to take off, and learning factories like Faber (in spite of everything that took place on screen for 109 minutes) could propel their graduates to success if they’d take a more sober approach.
Animal House was perhaps more prescient than its National Lampoon creators realized. While the men were reveling in toga parties and food fights, the women were actually going to class, apparently. In the real world, women’s share of U.S. college enrollment would rise from less than 47% in 1962 to nearly 60% today. Women gained something of an edge in the knowledge economy, becoming better educated and also more likely to vote Democratic, fueling a modern gender gap in politics.
This brief history lesson is necessary for understanding a shocking but most revealing comment about the surging use of artificial intelligence, or AI, last week. It came from Alex Karp, the outspoken CEO of Palantir, the Big Tech software giant loaded with Pentagon and government contracts, during an interview with CNBC.
Listen closely.
“This [AI] 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,” said Karp, in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society.”
To be sure, Karp framed his comment more as a prediction than as an endorsement — but he didn’t seem particularly upset about this outcome. You’ve certainly heard the expression that somebody just said the quiet part out loud. But Karp’s truth bomb about the real impact of the AI revolution was at the volume of standing right next to the bank of speakers at an AC/DC concert.
The 58-year-old Haverford College alum couched his remarks as a meditation on the kind of jobs — presumably in the college-educated “PMC,” the professional and managerial classes despised by Donald Trump’s MAGA voters as cosmopolitan elites — that will be displaced by the new robots. He said society must ask “how are we gonna explain to people who are likely going to have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
It’s worse than even that, however. Karp is conceding that the knowledge economy of the post-World War II era has posed a new threat to the patriarchy, with young women getting more diplomas and the bulk of young men falling further behind. For a long time, there’s been a debate about how to get more men back on the college track. Karp’s AI comment suggests that if men can’t win this game, Big Tech will flip over the board.
Silicon Valley wants to help America’s “left behind” — not by making it easier for them to learn, but by rendering knowledge into a cheap commodity with no intrinsic value.
To be sure, knowledge will still wield power. But that power will be controlled by the dude-bros of Silicon Valley, handed to robots and taken away from the people — majority women, majority Democrats — who developed their brains and their ability to think critically by reading Toni Morrison or Jürgen Habermas.
And Karp is not the only Big Tech mogul who sees brainpower as a commodity and not as a human aspiration.
“We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for,” Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, told the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C. Altman was addressing the supply-demand problems around manufacturing enough chips and building the energy-guzzling data centers that power AI. He, too, voiced little concern about what it might mean to live in a future where knowledge isn’t earned but simply bought.
The science-fiction fantasy has always been that robots would liberate humankind, but now that future is almost here and it seems people are only going to be liberated from their paying jobs.
Then what?
This seemingly mindless push from Big Tech for a mindless society is just one feature of a Silicon Valley billionaire class that can build a computer chip but can’t locate a moral compass. Karp’s Palantir — whose best-known cofounder, Peter Thiel, has managed to help elect Donald Trump and crush press freedom in one warped lifetime — has become an avatar of the modern dystopian surveillance state, earning nearly $122 million over three years from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to aid its mass deportation efforts.
AI isn’t bringing back a thriving blue-collar economy, no matter what Karp’s fellow Haverford alum Howard Lutnick says about the exciting future of screwing in iPhones. But it can please Trump voters by bringing the kind of havoc that’s been wreaked upon American manufacturing to the PMC, and thus making all those Democrat-voting English-lit majors just as miserable as they are.
The cruelty is the point. The same technology that can target a girls school in Minab can decimate a women’s college on the Main Line.
Still, in a weird way, those of us in the 99 Percent owe Karp a debt of gratitude for uttering the truth. We need to use our critical thinking skills, while we still have them, to save humanity as well as the humanities. That means real curbs on AI and the militaristic surveillance state it’s empowering, campaign-finance reform, and a meaningful wealth tax on the Karps and Altmans of our wildly unequal society.
The occasional beer or Whopper won’t kill you, but listen to your inner Dean Wormer: Stupid really is no way to go through life.
wbunch@inquirer.com
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