Some economists and experts say that critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), when a robot can do much of the heavy lifting on coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune that a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, the Palantir founder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.
“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “You went to an elite school and you studied philosophy — I’ll use myself as an example — hopefully you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”
Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.
Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking about his own career, “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”
The answer echoed past comments Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.
“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November.
Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities degrees are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 that the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”
McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving.
Karp has long been an advocate for vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with a chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.
The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in their announcement of the fellowship.
“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.
“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the US Army’s MAVEN system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.
“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.
Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”
He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then, I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”
Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried.
“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.
