AI might disrupt all those pesky highly-educated female voters who keep casting a ballot for Democrats.
To be clear: that assessment isn’t coming from me
Rather, it’s coming from one of the key architects of our glorious AI-driven economy: Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of tech firm Palantir.
On Thursday Karp sat down with CNBC to chat about Palantir’s AI-driven Maven Smart System,
which the US military is using to visualize potential targets and “nominate” them to be bombed.
As well as talking about how America’s “lethal capabilities” make it very special, Karp stressed the extent to which AI is going to shift the political landscape.
“The one thing that I think that even now is underestimated by all actors in industry … is how disruptive these technologies are,” Karp said.
“If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base
– highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat,
and military and working-class people who do not feel supported
– and you believe that that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.”
He added: “Like … this 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.
These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.”
Got that everyone? Disruption, disruption, disruption.
And in case you didn’t catch it: disruption.
Once you get beyond all the disruptive disruptions, it seems that what Karp is saying is that AI is eventually going to hurt the economic position of Democrats in general,
and highly educated female voters in particular
– and that will have knock-on effects politically.
Meanwhile working-class male voters will emerge as the winners of our reshaped economy.
The extent to which this is accurate is debatable;
-- blue-collar jobs may be less vulnerable to AI in the short-term,
but technology is coming for those occupations too.
However, I think the really interesting question here is this:
was Karp’s assessment a warning
or was it a sales pitch?