Palantir’s billionaire CEO says only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers — ‘or you’re neurodivergent’

I will not prophesy winners and losers as if history were a racetrack. When a CEO declares that only trade workers or the neurodivergent will succeed, he is not describing a neutral future. He is participating in the production of a new regime of truth about work, intelligence, and value.

Notice how this discourse classifies populations. The humanities graduate becomes “obsolete.” The vocational body becomes “authentic.” The “neurodivergent” becomes a reservoir of exploitable aptitude. This is a contemporary form of examination that sorts, measures, and reallocates bodies according to their supposed utility @The examination is a central disciplinary technique that fuses hierarchical observation with normalizing judgement into a ‘normalizing gaze’ which qualifies, classifies, and punishes individuals, simultaneously subjecting them as objects of power and objectifying them as objects of knowledge..

At the same time, AI firms promise efficiency, security, even civil liberties, while expanding infrastructures of surveillance and battlefield automation. Power becomes less spectacular, more technical, embedded in platforms and data flows @Disciplinary power, operating through hierarchized surveillance, is simultaneously absolutely indiscreet—ubiquitous, all-seeing, and self-surveilling—and absolutely discreet—silent, continuous, and non-spectacular—thereby replacing public displays of force with an uninterrupted play of calculated gazes that act on bodies through a ‘physics’ of space, optics, and mechanics rather than overt violence..

So I would ask: who benefits from this new division of intelligence? And how are we being invited to understand ourselves in order to fit it?

I am always suspicious when someone announces that history has decided in advance who will count and who will not. That is not analysis. It is prophecy in the service of power.

What strikes me is not the insult to the humanities. It is the quiet redefinition of human activity itself. If intelligence becomes merely calculative efficiency, then of course machines will surpass us, and only those who repair them or resemble them will “succeed.” In such a world, thought is reduced to brain function and action to fabrication, and both are swallowed by the life process of production and survival @Under the reign of the life process, contemplation becomes meaningless, thought is reduced to calculative brain-function outperformed by machines, and action is recast as fabrication which itself is downgraded to a form of laboring..

The real question is not which type of worker triumphs, but whether we are allowing technology to determine what counts as meaningful activity at all. Tools once helped us build a world; now we risk building systems that no longer serve the world but rule it @It is misguided to assess machines solely by the service or disservice they render to humans; tools were invented to erect a world, and the crucial question is whether machines still serve world and things or whether their automatic processes now rule and destroy them..

Politics begins when we ask: what kind of common world do we wish to preserve?

I find these prophecies sociologically naïve. To say that only trade workers or the “neurodivergent” will succeed presumes that the labour market is governed by aptitude alone. It is not. What matters is one’s class position, that is, one’s typical chances for income, standing, and life chances within a given economic order @A person's 'class position' is defined by their typical chances for provision with goods, outer social standing, and inner personal fate that derive from the extent and type of their control over goods, education, and skills and how these can be valorised for income within a given economic order; a 'class' is the group of people sharing the same class position..

AI will not abolish stratification. It will reorganise it. The decisive question is who controls the capital, the data, the administrative apparatus, and the credentials that allow one’s skills to be valorised.

Moreover, advanced AI does not diminish bureaucracy. On the contrary, modern capitalism has historically required ever more calculable administration, and any rationalised AI system will intensify this need @Modern capitalism has historically created, and now primarily sustains, the need for constant, firm, intensive, and calculable administration, making bureaucracy the fateful and largely inescapable nucleus of all large-scale mass organisations, including any rational socialist system; only small-scale enterprises can significantly evade it, while capitalism and bureaucracy mutually reinforce each other..

The issue is not humanities versus trades. It is who commands the apparatus and who becomes its functionary.