When a Philosophy PhD Says 'The Humanities Are Dead'

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Hello, dear subscriber. Have you heard, lately, that the humanities matter more than ever in the age of AI? Or, on the flip side, that the humanities education traditionally offered by universities is becoming worthless?

This January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a conversation between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made headlines. Asked how AI would affect jobs, Karp answered:

“AI will destroy the jobs that people educated in the humanities [at traditional universities] go looking for.”

Then in March, he went further, saying only two kinds of people have a secure future: those with vocational training, and those with neurodivergence¹. Here’s the interesting part—Karp himself majored in philosophy at Haverford College, went to Stanford Law School, and earned a philosophy PhD from Goethe University in Germany. He was essentially using himself as the example, saying “this skillset won’t sell in the market.” That made the claim land even harder.

This wasn’t a one-off remark. In an Axios interview last year, Karp said much the same thing: “If you have the IQ to get into Yale but only generalist knowledge and no specialized expertise, you’re finished.” He’s been consistently pushing skepticism toward traditional elite education. But does this claim actually hold up against the data?

🔍 What Karp Said—and What He Didn’t

Karp’s argument has a clear structure once you lay it out.

As AI replaces much of the knowledge work once done by humans—coding, research, and the like—the economic value of people with a generalist humanities education from elite universities collapses. Meanwhile, people with vocational training—assembling batteries, analyzing drone footage—become more valuable precisely because AI can’t easily replace them.

Employment data does partially back this up. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 climbed to roughly 5.7% in Q4 2025. The overall unemployment rate during the same period was 4.2%—meaning college graduates posted a higher-than-average unemployment rate. The underemployment rate² hit 42.5%, the highest since 2020.

But there’s something Karp left out.

The thing he says he does every day at Palantir—“find someone’s outlier aptitude, focus them on that, and pull them away from the five other things they mistakenly believe they’re good at”—is, at its core, a humanities skill. Reading people. Grasping context. Making judgment calls in unstructured situations. The philosophy PhD who says a philosophy PhD is useless is, in effect, thinking philosophically every single day.

There’s another thing worth noting. Look at the Meritocracy Fellowship program Karp launched in 2025: it gives high school graduates paid internships and even a shot at a full-time interview at Palantir. It offers a $5,400 monthly stipend, wrapped in messaging like “skip the debt, reclaim your years.” But what do participants actually do in this program? They study philosophy and history while working on live projects. In the end, this isn’t a rejection of humanities education itself—it’s a rejection of the existing university system that delivers that education, with his own company positioned as the alternative.