What the Training Data Can’t See

Palantir’s chief executive officer, Alex Karp, said recently that two types of people will thrive in the AI era: those with vocational skills and those who are neurodivergent.

I’m dyslexic. And I have a complicated relationship with that word “thrive.”

Because dyslexia is not a superpower you can switch on. It’s not a productivity hack or a hiring category. Some days it’s the thing that lets you see a pattern no one else can see. Other days it’s the reason a simple email takes four times longer than it should. It’s the reason you avoid certain rooms. The reason you developed instincts that look like confidence but started as compensation.

So when a billionaire CEO frames neurodivergence as a competitive advantage, I get it. And I also don’t. And I say that as someone who does not have much time for Alex or the world he is building. But on this, he’s not far off.

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