Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, where LLMs can do much of the heavy lifting in coding and research. Brandeis economics professor Benjamin Shiller recently said: luck The future labor market will value a “strange premium.” Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp is not one of those voices.
“It’s going to destroy jobs in the humanities,” Karp said in a conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January when asked how AI would impact jobs. “You went to an elite school and studied philosophy. I’ll use myself as an example, but hopefully you have other skills as well, which would be difficult to market.”
Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his doctorate in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He talked about his experience of getting his first job.
Regarding his career, Karp told Fink that he remembers thinking, “I don’t know who’s going to give me my first job.”
The comment echoed previous statements Karp has made about a certain type of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.
“If you’re the type of person who goes to Yale, and you have a classically high IQ, and you have general but not specific knowledge, you’re going to be disappointed,” Karp said in an interview. Axios In November.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI will disrupt liberal arts careers – here’s who he thinks will succeed
Karp recently expanded on his predictions about who is best prepared for the AI era.
“There are basically two ways to know if you have a future,” said the 58-year-old billionaire. TBPN “One, they’re vocationally trained. And two, they’re neurodivergent.” Karp credits his dyslexia (a learning disability that affects reading, writing, and information processing) to Palantir’s success. More broadly, neurodivergence may include conditions such as ADHD and autism.
Karp also predicted massive disruption for humanities graduates, Democratic voters and women.
“This technology will confuse humanities-trained, primarily Democratic voters, reducing their economic power, and increasing the power, economic power of professionally trained, working-class, often male voters. And these disruptions will therefore disrupt every aspect of our society,” he said. CNBC.
Not all CEOs agree with Karp’s assessment that humanities graduates are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein said: luck In 2024, the company was looking for graduates to study “something unrelated to finance or technology.”
Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, recently said in an interview: harvard business review In order to move away from linear problem-solving in AI, the company is “focusing more on liberal arts majors, which have traditionally been deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity.”
Karp has long advocated vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched the Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship and the opportunity to interview for a full-time position four months later.
In its announcement of the fellowship, the company criticized U.S. universities for their “opaque” admissions practices that “indoctrinate” students and “replace meritocracy with excellence.”
“Whether you didn’t go to school, whether you went to a not-so-great school, whether you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian. No one cares about anything else,” Karp said on an earnings call in the second quarter of last year.
“I think there needs to be another way to test aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He noted that he is a former police officer who went to college and now manages the Army’s Maven System, a Palantir AI tool that processes drone images and video.
“Traditional aptitude testing methods may not have fully revealed a person’s irreplaceable talents,” he says.
Karp also cited the example of engineers who make batteries at battery companies, saying these workers are “very valuable, if not irreplaceable, because you can rapidly turn them into something different than what they were before.”
He said what he does all day at Palantir is “understand what someone’s unusual aptitude is. And I try to teach them that and stay with that instead of the other five things I think they’re good at.”
Karp’s comments come as a growing number of employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and the skills employers are looking for in a tight labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers aged 16 to 24 reached 10.4% in December, and the unemployment rate for college graduates is rising. But Karp isn’t too worried.
“There will be more than enough jobs for your people, especially those in vocational training,” he said.
A version of this article was published on Fortune.com on January 20, 2026.
Learn more about the future of work:
- Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha believe that AI could make middle management obsolete.
- Ford CEO Jim Farley said the U.S. is sleepwalking through a crisis in its “essential economy.”
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s advice for workers scared of AI.
