AI Feudalism

None of that actually happened, but the ritual lives on. The latest episode came from Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, at the World Economic Forum, where he suggested that in the age of AI, most people should brace themselves for a return to physical labor.

In his version of the future, artificial intelligence grabs all the brainwork, and humans, if they want to stay useful, start assembling batteries, casings, and other manual acts of desperation. For graduates of philosophy and the humanities, this is framed as a last-call warning - no practical skills, no future. It sounds like a 19th-century manifesto, just wrapped in a corporate suit, buzzwords, and a PowerPoint deck.

It gets even better when you remember who’s delivering this sermon. The head of a company that makes its money selling advanced analytics software. Palantir earns cash by helping governments and corporations make decisions, connect data, and automate thinking work. In other words, by boosting brainpower, not killing it. It’s hard not to think this is like a car manufacturer announcing that the future of transport is actually horse-drawn carts. Sustainable. Authentic. Retro.

The problem with this vision is that it doesn’t match everyday reality in IT. Sure, AI tools can now generate code, summarize docs, or suggest architecture ideas. They can also, with the same energy, hallucinate, mess up facts, make logical errors, and quietly drop subtle but very expensive bugs into production. So instead of firing teams left and right, companies are hiring people to fix what intelligent models just broke. Congrats, we’ve created a new job - a professional AI babysitter.

Meanwhile, other industry leaders are pushing a totally different story. According to them, AI won’t really replace workers, it’ll just make them work faster, longer, and under more pressure. Fewer jobs, maybe, but less work? Yeah, right. In that context, the idea of everyone going back to the assembly line sounds more like a catchy line than a serious economic forecast. Great headline, low chances.

There’s one more ironic twist. The loudest voices talking about the end of brain work are often the same ones making money by selling stories about how all-powerful AI is. The more inevitable and unstoppable algorithms seem, the easier it is to justify new funding rounds, new rollouts, and new “next-gen” platforms. In that light, stories about programmers or analysts becoming useless soon sound a lot like old promises of fully automated factories - always just around the corner, never actually on the shop floor.

This doesn’t mean nothing will change. A lot will change - what skills matter, how teams are built, how work is measured, and how fast things ship. Some roles will disappear, new ones will show up, others will get brutally reshaped. But boiling all this down to “AI will take your desk, grab your work gloves” is not just dumb it’s also perfect clickbait. Fear sells, reality, not so much.

The most ironic part is that the future of work in IT still looks… like work in IT. Just with more tools, more time pressure, and more responsibility for decisions made together with algorithms. Instead of going back to the industrial age, we’re walking into an age of permanent debugging. Only now it’s not just code that needs fixing, but also language models and the marketing stories their creators tell about them.

So if someone really wants to know what to do as AI keeps rising, the answer is less flashy than speeches in Davos. Instead of treating AI like a magic bulldozer that will shove everyone out of offices and onto production lines, it’s better to ask who actually shapes today’s job market and who takes home the biggest gains from tech change. History shows one thing pretty clearly... work rarely disappears. It just changes its job title and its place in the pecking order, and in a world with huge money concentration, it tends to make the gap between the few at the top and the many at the bottom even harder to ignore.