Will Bunch: Big Tech says the quiet part out loud. They want you to be stupid.

[highplainsdem]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/alex-karp-palantir-ai-higher-education-20260315.html

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This is an issue I’ve been following for years, culminating in my 2022 book about how higher education became the main driver of America’s bitter political divide. It starts with a 60 Years’ War on critical thinking that began after the steep spike in college enrollment in the 1960s triggered protests against the nation’s racism at home and militarism abroad. In 1970, an economic adviser to both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon named Roger Freeman said that era’s quiet part out loud when he warned, “We are in danger of an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite!”

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This is where Karp, Thiel, Altman and their fellow billionaires come in. The truth is that in proposing to nuke the playing field of the knowledge economy, they aren’t really offering anything to America’s frustrated white working-class men....

...Except for revenge. AI isn’t bringing back a thriving blue-collar economy, no matter what Karp’s fellow Haverford alum Howard Lutnick says about the exciting future of screwing in iPhones. But it can please Trump voters by bringing the kind of havoc that’s been wreaked upon American manufacturing to the PMC, and thus making all those Democrat-voting English-lit majors just as miserable as they are.

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Still, in a weird way, those of us in the 99 Percent owe Karp a debt of gratitude for uttering the truth. We need to use our critical thinking skills, while we still have them, to save humanity as well as the humanities. That means real curbs on AI and the militaristic surveillance state it’s empowering, campaign-finance reform, and a meaningful wealth tax on the Karps and Altmans of our wildly unequal society.

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PMC = Professional-Managerial Class. White collar workers, those whose jobs the AI bros expect - hope - to be lost, more quickly than blue collar workers will lose their jobs, since the robots the tech industry is trying to develop still don't work very well. The genAI tools currently already impacting don't work very well, either, but the genAI peddlers have been good at convincing a lot of employers that AI works well enough that they can lay off a lot of workers, then demand those remaining employees work harder than ever to catch the AI errors...and then blame the employees if this doesn't work out well.

The AI bros have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the fact that using those AI tools dumbs down the users, as studies including Microsoft's have confirmed. I'd chalked that lack of concern up to greed. But now it seems more likely that at least some AI bros and VCs not only didn't care if they dumbed down AI users, they saw that as a good thing.

Their goal is their own techocratic elite in control of society via AI.

[gab13by13]

1. They want you to be dead

depopulation.

[cachukis]

2. Paywall. Drat.