24
votes
“This technology disrupts [...] Democratic—voters, [and] increases the economic power of [...] male, working-class voters”
Link information
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- Title
- Palantir CEO Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power
- Authors
- Malcolm Ferguson
- Published
- Mar 12 2026
- Word count
- 267 words
Full quote wouldn't fit in the title, here it is:
Societally we need to figure out how we handle direct, open undermining of democracy. To me, this feels like someone announcing they are going to rob a bank and sharing a detailed plan on how to do so. I can't quite wrap my head around how we face this kind of thing given technology is putting the power to directly adjust the balance of power in the hands of an individual.
This undermines the core of our society; how do we continue to have functional democracy? How do you think we should handle this societally? I imagine Karp is primarily focussed on influencing American politics here, but I think this is a worldwide issue.
Step one: don't listen to that dude.
Technology isn't the problem, capital is the problem, and the influence and connections that come with it.
This guy's pitch to the business world and the current administration is just that, a pitch. Palatir's influence comes from their spending, not their technology.
I believe in order to solve the problem we have to correctly identify it. That means first acknowledging that it isn't new. The world (and especially parts of the west) has been on a steady path of increasing Oligarchy for... well forever, but for conversation's sake let's say the industrial revolution. Or if we want a more recent turning point: The Reagan and Thatcher administrations.
It hasn't been a secret for a long time. Remember when the Bush Jr administration got caught in bed with the energy/military industrial complex and suffered almost no consequences? That was when it became clear to everyone left who hasn't already figured it out that you don't even have to pretend to hide it anymore: money governs.
It's a mistake, IMO, to imagine that the core of our society (if by that you mean democracy) wasn't already undermined. That illusion has been reliably keeping the electorate from effectively rallying behind the right people, and causes, for a long time. It's so easy to distract us from the core problem.
I think that when that basic truth is common knowledge to the degree that it's boring, we might have a shot at electing people who genuinely want to do something about the problem. Until then it will remain trivial for the Oligarchy to make sure that the Bernie Sanders' of the world never make it on a ticket that matters.
It feels like you're purposely misinterpreting what he's saying. I don't agree with him, and I think planitir is one of the most evil new startups to rear it's head, but he's not announcing his intention to undermine democracy.
He's saying that currently, the well educated professional class is who holds economic and political power in this country, and is the status quo (again, highly arguable, considering who was elected president), and that AI will weaken their economic, and thus political power (again, highly arguable. If AI can actually ever deliver what the tech bros are promising, seems plausible though).
Because of this unprecedented shift in who has economic and political power, there will be societal turmoil.
It has nothing to do with democracy or undermining it and everything to do with what types of work he thinks will be valuable in the future; working with your hands will be valuable, working with your mind will not be.
It's a stupid point, but it's not the stupid point you think he's making.
It's definitely a descriptive, not normative, view. But I don't think it's stupid but should merit serious attention and worry from Democrats. I think, if anything, it is a gift.
There is a good chance that AI does decimate the professional class, so the Democrats should really start making a contingency plan instead of counting on the same playbook of expecting urban professionals + women + POCs to carry them to power.
That's a very new thing, a post-Trump phenomena. It was the reverse not even a decade ago - Democrats were the party of the unions (hence the "blue wall", that's now rusted away), Republicans were the laissez faire party of lower taxes, pro-business, and the upper class.
It's definitely not a playbook the Democrats have been "relying on" - this new shift to the upper middle class is an uncomfortable shift forced from Trump's allure to the working class. It was not even 4 years ago that Biden bailed out of the UAW, only have to UAW backstab the democrats in the next election.
In what sense?
In essense, what he's saying is that
This I imagine most people would agree with
Not everyone will agree with that, because the extent to which LLMs are effective is in question, but regardless I hardly find that "LLMs are going to cause societal change" to be an "anti-democratic" argument, so much as it is a very common observation or prediction.
If anything, isn't this what the "luddites" (in a non-negative sense) want?
Here is more of the interview.
Can I ask why? If that was Karp’s plan, it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to tell everybody about it.
Karp is an idiot who evidently does not know what the fuck he’s talking about. LLMs, if anything, increase the employability of “feminine” humanities and liberal arts types, and they definitely benefit from having a college (or a very good high school) education to use them well and not shoot yourself in the foot. Many of the core skills needed to use LLMs and agentic workflows productively are management skills.
Being able to clearly articulate needs objectives, being able understand trade-offs between different courses of action, being able to monitor delegated tasks to ensure they’re being done correctly and aligned to the ultimate goal, being able to effectively allocate limited time and resources, etc. Anyone who actually does things besides making grand pronouncements at investor panels understands these are rare skills that are difficult to hire for.
And on top of the management skills, you need some different fundamentals than are usually recruited for. These are language models and interacting with them requires a mastery of language, a thing you learn from spending a lot of time writing. You not only need to be able to write coherently and succinctly so it has a clear idea of what you want and doesn’t need to burn tokens inefficiently on parsing pointless digressions. You also need to understand that the model is trying to predict what response to give based on real world training data. This means that it will reflect back to you how you write to it. If you talk to the LLM like a rube, it will talk back to you like the kind of person who regularly has written correspondence with a rube. If you want medical advice from an LLM (you shouldn’t, but this is just an example), you are far more likely to get a good response back if you talk to it like a very informed patient having a knowledgeable discussion with a doctor that you respect because the most statistically likely sorts of comments you would get to that would be the sorts of comments a knowledgeable and respected physician would make. If you, in contrast, try to talk to it like a crunchy granola woo hippie then you are increasing the odds of getting a response that a snake oil salesman would give. (There’s complicating factors here, the actual chatbots do a lot of post-training and impose rules to steer them away from providing undesirable replies like that regardless of how dumb you’re being, but these are countermeasures to mitigate against an outcome that is inherent to how it works so it won’t be perfect.)
Really the sort of person who will thrive here is someone with a broad foundation in general knowledge, very strong language skills, decent logical reasoning skills, and has read broadly enough and possesses sufficient empathy to be able to understand how to talk to elicit the kind of response you want. To get really deep into using them for specific professional purposes they will reward a very strong knowledge of theory and logic but deprioritize a lot of technical execution competencies. You don’t need to know syntax or basic operations as a programmer, but you will still need to understand why you would choose one sort of architecture over another and whether its doing things in ways that line up with your long term vision. It’s sort of in the same way that easy search and lookup tools made it much less important to have a lot of general fact knowledge in your head. We don’t strictly need to remember everyone’s phone numbers anymore so we just don’t.
I actually think people who practice improv might actually get pretty good at this, because the whole deal there is to understand how your scene partner thinks and do your bit in a way that leaves enough raw material for them to pick and build off of. Either way, toxic incel dweebs would think all of these skills are “gay” or “femoid” or whatever.
I think the rest of your post is really good, but I think this is a pretty odd way to start. Karp has a JD from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory (disclaimer: I don’t know what that is) from Goethe in Germany. He’s the cofounder of a successful tech company. You can describe Karp many ways, but “idiot who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about” is a strange one.
This isn’t the first dumbfuck thing he’s said. I also have degrees from prestigious universities and I’ve met and dealt with lots of idiots along the way. They might be able to recite references about the specific thing they studied, but simply be idiots at everything else. This means their average take (which probably won’t be about the thing they studied) is going to be stupid.
Your dislike of Karp is fundamentally causing you to attribute to him other negative traits (like being an idiot.) That’s an error, and it’s also foolish. If you think Karp is destroying the world, you should be treating him like he’s some sort of criminal mastermind just in case he is, because it’s better to overestimate your enemies than underestimate them. Dismissing every neocon as an idiot feels good, but is a strategic mistake.
In that case Karp is probably one of the few people in the world qualified to make his statements. He has a doctorate in the humanities - which he wrote, I will note, in a language that is not his native language - and successfully co-founded a tech company which has become an AI company. He has legitimate credibility as both a student of the humanities and as a tech mogul. If anything, this is the specific take where you should begrudgingly admit that Karp has the standing to hold an opinion.
And if we’re talking about being wrong, he did not call the humanities feminine. He said “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat.” That is not a moral judgement, it is a statistical fact: more women receive advanced degrees than men and holders of advanced degrees (regardless of gender) overwhelmingly vote democrat. I would also note that his entire point was that those individuals are going to be disrupted the most and thus society will have to figure out what we’re going to do to prevent everything from collapsing. If you’re imputing some sort of toxic incel ideology here, that’s on you.
The title of his biography is called “the philosopher in the valley,” for god’s sake. He doesn’t think the humanities are “gay.”
For the record, I don’t have strong feelings about Karp and I regret, typing this now, putting so much effort into defending him.
Having a JD or a PhD, regardless of the subject, doesn't prevent you from saying dumb, uninformed things, especially when they're outside your area of expertise (and no, getting a PhD in social theory does not make you an expert in everything that involves human society). You can argue that claiming he doesn't know what he's talking about is wrong using actual evidence from things he's written, but the mere existence of his degree does not automatically serve as evidence that it's not possible that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- especially given that AI is not something he would have studied formally with that academic background. It's extremely possible for him to not know what he's talking about, so it would be better to defend him by pointing to places where he demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about in his actual writing, rather than just citing the existence of his degrees (and, in later comments, other achievements that also don't entail that his claims in this article are correct -- co-founding an AI company if anything increases the likelihood that you'll say bullshit about AI that isn't true, because of the extremely obvious source of bias you have as a result of your financial incentives. Though I suppose it usually means it's deliberate rather than due to pure idiocy, ig).
I also, for the record, don't have strong feelings about Karp. But highly educated people who say dumb bullshit are a dime a dozen and that goes double when they're "tech moguls", so defend him with his actual statements rather than his academic pedigree.
I'm not taking a position on whether or not he's right. (I think he is, but that's not the question at hand.) I'm objecting to the characterization of him as "an idiot" or "dumbfuck."
I'm fairly certain that use of "idiot" and "dumbfuck" in this context are principally being used as pithy, insulting ways to say "this guy consistently says very wrong things about stuff he doesn't fully understand", but setting that aside, highly educated people can also be "idiots" and "dumbfucks" depending on context, the individual in question, and what you actually mean when you use those insults. Insert self-deprecating joke here.
Anyone in the loop know what technology this is referring to other than "something with AI"?
I don't, unfortunately. I had a look, followed the link through to the tweet with the video, couldn't find an explanation. I was surprised the article didn't mention it
Ok, thanks for looking.
It’s a reference to Maven.
Thanks!