Palantir Technologies’ chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, says AI will transform the US workforce, not replace it.
In a new Bloomberg Technology interview, Sankar argues that the country’s competitive advantage lies not in manufacturing scale but in software and the application of AI to boost productivity.
While China may have a large industrial base, Sankar says that the US is second to none in terms of software and AI.
“You have to lean into your asymmetric advantages in the David versus Goliath battle. The Chinese absolutely have pound for pound more industrial capacity today. Well, what are asymmetric advantages? We definitely have the best software as a nation in the world. We also have AI.”
According to Sankar, the US must use AI as a tool to supercharge other sectors of the economy.
“AI is not about AI. It’s not about AGI. It’s not about transhumanism. AI is about applying it towards all the other weaknesses that we have.”
Sankar notes that the core value of AI is in its ability to radically enhance labor output, not eliminate it.
“How do you make the American worker 50 times more productive? The normative value here is to give the American worker superpowers so that you can reindustrialize so that all the things that today we perceive as being beyond the efficient frontier of being made in America can be done here.”
The Palantir executive slams Silicon Valley’s view that AI will displace employees, describing it as detached from the realities of the modern labor economy.
“I reject the message that’s coming up the street here from Silicon Valley—the ivory tower doomerism that is just going to result in mass unemployment.
I live on the factory floor. I live in the ICU beds. The nurses are the first people to adopt this. It gives them more time to be with the patient or the submarine industrial parts manufacturer where they have more time making the parts, less time munching the data to do it.
I see a renaissance of how AI is actually empowering the blue-collar worker to get more done.”
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