PALANTIR CTO SHYAM SANKAR: The American people are being lied to about AI
The American people are being lied to about artificial intelligence (AI). On one hand, we’re offered apocalyptic prophecies of job loss and oppression — even the extinction of the human race. On the other, we hear utopian fantasies of a future without toil, without sickness, perhaps even without death — a life without meaning or mission.
The utopians and the doomers commit the same error: they neglect human agency.
The future of AI is not an inevitability to be endured by the American people — it is for us, the American people, to shape.
AI is not a divinity. It cannot snap its fingers and eliminate jobs; people will use AI to cut jobs or create them. AI cannot decide to oppress us; people will build AI tools that either enforce privacy and civil liberties or erode them. AI did not choose to write poems or generate pornography; people chose to build cheap consumer goods rather than genuine tools of productivity.
These are choices you and I must make every day.
I’ve spent the past two decades alongside men and women who are building the future of American AI. They include some of the best software engineers in the world, but also college dropouts, veterans, blue-collar autodidacts and nurses. They don’t treat AI as something that will happen to them — they recognize it as a tool for them to wield to make themselves more productive and our country safer and more prosperous. And so should you.
Below are some principles and themes I’ve seen informing the people and organizations wielding AI effectively and in service of worthy ends: reindustrialization, deterrence, improved healthcare and more.
The job-loss narrative is a ploy to attract investors, drive media attention and consolidate political power. The real promise of AI in the enterprise is to make the American worker 50x more productive — to unleash his taste and agency. This isn’t speculation; it’s reality.
I’ve seen maritime industrial base manufacturers use AI to open a third shift. I’ve spoken with the ICU nurse who learned to wield AI so she could spend more time at the bedside, where she’s needed most.
Doomerism is a luxury of the ivory tower; the future of AI is being built on frontlines and factory floors.
For a century, American prosperity was underwritten by a simple bargain: when the worker produces more, the worker earns more. That bargain was broken in the 1970s — not by technology, but by policy choices that stripped workers of power. We will not repeat that mistake.
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When AI doubles output, the worker who wields it should see that gain reflected in his paycheck, equity stake and share of the enterprise. This is not redistribution — it is recognition. The worker is not a cost center; he is a co-creator of value. Treat him accordingly.
The electrical engineer in Georgia who enlisted in the Navy out of high school deserves the same capabilities as the Stanford computer science grad in Silicon Valley. He deserves access to instruments of genuine productivity, not consumer toys.
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Before Gutenberg, a book cost as much as a house. Knowledge was locked in monasteries and chained to shelves. The printing press broke that monopoly on information. AI is the printing press of our age — the same technology that serves Fortune 500 companies should serve the worker in Tulsa, the nurse in Tampa and the farmer in North Dakota.
The benefits of AI belong to all Americans.
AI is the product of American grit, ingenuity and culture. It is our birthright. No American worker should be left behind for lack of training. Workers should have access to meaningful AI education that helps them bend AI to their will — not the other way around. The ICU nurse doesn't need to learn to code; she needs AI to surface the right patient data at the right moment — so that her clinical judgment, honed over years at the bedside, can be applied faster and more accurately.
The American worker is not deficient; he is under-leveraged. AI is the lever.
The frontline worker understands what the C-suite cannot. Policy should be shaped by practitioners — the ICU nurse, the manufacturing technician, the logistics coordinator — not by academics, consultants or lawyers.
Toyota built the most successful manufacturing system in history on a simple premise: the worker knows best. Its Creative Idea Suggestion System has operated for more than 70 years. Ideas flow up from the factory floor, not down from corner offices. The result: billions in value created and a culture where every worker is an owner of quality.
Push power to the tip of the spear and let the American worker do what he does best.
AI should eliminate bureaucracy, not add to it. No new compliance theater. No "AI governance" committees designed to slow things down and centralize power in "managers." AI should empower the American worker to move faster, not slow him down.
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Every layer of process that stands between the frontline worker and their ability to do their job is deadweight to be destroyed.
AI development and deployment should prioritize American workers and American industry. The goal is not efficiency in the abstract — it is American prosperity in the concrete.
China's manufacturing productivity grows at 6% per year. Ours grows at 0.4%. If we don't invest in AI and automation, we'll lose. The American worker with AI superpowers erodes China's competitive advantage.
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I see these principles embodied and practiced every day by men and women who are not invited to speak on panels or record podcasts and publish op-eds. They are quietly leading by example and proving what is possible when the most powerful technology ever created meets the most capable workforce ever assembled.
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Armed with AI, the American worker will rebuild our industrial base. He will outproduce any competitor. He will create prosperity not just for himself but for his children, who will inherit not a diminished nation, but an ascendant one.
Silicon Valley builds AI. Wall Street funds it. Washington regulates it.
But the American worker — on the factory floor, in the ICU, in the field — wields it.
And that will make all the difference.