Billionaire Peter Thiel says AI boom will make society favour people with strong verbal skills, not maths skills

PayPal co-founder and former CEO Peter Thiel

Billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel warned that artificial intelligence would upend the jobs market, placing roles that require mathematical prowess at risk while ushering in opportunities for those with strong verbal skills.

During an interaction on a talk show, Conversation with Tyler, Thiel said: “It’s going to be much worse for math people than word people… People have told me that in the next 3-5 years, AI will be able to solve all the US Maths Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit.”

He pointed out that the Silicon Valley in the 21st century is “way too biased” towards those with math skills. Thiel added that the reason behind such favouritism is not clear, which is why it “seems deeply unstable” and that’s what he would bet on “getting worse”.

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Thiel also said that math has become the test for everything nowadays. “People who are going for medical schools are weeded out through physics and calculus. I am not sure if that is really correlated with dexterity in neurosurgery.”

He also gave an example of how new technologies are likely to make certain qualities, which we value the most as of now, redundant. “I used to have bias towards people with chess skill. I used to test everyone on their chess ability. But it got undermined by the computers in 1997 (IBM’s Deep Blue had defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov). Isn’t that what’s going to happen to math and isn’t that a long overdue rebalance of our society,” he asked.

Agree ... for a while... then humanity will be most valued https://t.co/nHBukSidvZ

— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) May 26, 2024

Reacting to a small clip of Thiel’s conversation posted on X, Indian-American venture capitalist and billionaire Vinod Khosla said he agrees with what the former PayPal CEO said and soon humanity will be valued the most. “Agree... for a while... then humanity will be most valued,” Khosla said.