The Eloi and the Morlocks

Eloi and Morlocks

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AI isn't dividing the world into winners and losers. It's dividing it into two different species.

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir — the company whose software helps governments and intelligence agencies automate decision-making at planetary scale — went on record this week telling people to skip elite colleges.

His reasoning was surgical: unless you're neurodivergent, the only path left with real durability is skilled trades. Electricians. Carpenters. Machinists. People who work in the physical world with their hands.

This isn't contrarianism. This isn't a VC doing a podcast hot take. This is the CEO of an AI infrastructure company telling you, with a straight face, that a Harvard MBA might be the worst investment you make in the next decade. And he's not alone. There are serious people — people whose names you'd recognize — privately telling their own children: don't bother with the degree track. It won't matter by the time it's supposed to pay off.

We've Seen This Movie Before

Remember the early internet days? "It's a fad." "Don't restructure your career around something this speculative." We know how that aged. The internet took roughly 20-25 years to fully mature. Long enough for late adopters to catch up. Long enough for slow movers to survive even if they arrived second.

AI is not going to give you that window. That's the part that's different this time.

When I was a kid, teachers warned us: "You won't always have a calculator in your pocket." I have a calculator on my wrist. In my pocket. One I can talk to through my earpiece that plots complex algorithmic math without me typing a single character. Did the calculator make us bad at math? No. It made us better. The same logic applies here — but only for the humans who actually use it.

The Bifurcation Is Real

H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. Humanity's distant future had split into two species: the Eloi, who lived on the surface in comfort but had become passive and intellectually hollow — and the Morlocks, who lived underground and actually ran everything.

Wells was writing about class. But the metaphor is eerily applicable right now. AI is producing a bifurcation — not between rich and poor, not between educated and uneducated — between adopters and non-adopters. And the gap is widening in real time. 84 percent of humanity has never typed a single AI prompt. Not once. After three years of breathless coverage. After GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and a thousand headlines declaring that everything has changed — 84 percent of the planet hasn't engaged with it at all. Meanwhile the 0.04 percent who are actually building with it are operating at a level of leverage that simply didn't exist two years ago. That's not a productivity gap. That's a capabilities gap. And it's compounding.

Why the Latency Is Lethal This Time

With the internet, slow adopters eventually recovered. The company that went online in 2005 instead of 1999 survived. AI adoption latency is different because the technology isn't waiting for you to catch up. Every six to twelve months, the capability floor rises dramatically. If you're skeptical now and plan to "get to it eventually" — you're not just behind. You're behind on a curve that is accelerating away from you.

The person who waited five years to adopt email missed some newsletters. The person who waits five years to engage with AI will find themselves in a world where their peers have had five years of compounding leverage — built workflows, developed judgment, integrated it into everything they do. That gap doesn't close.

The Neurodivergent Premium

The cognitive profile AI rewards most isn't the well-rounded, organized, process-following profile that traditional education was designed to produce. It's the profile education systems historically struggled with. Hyperfocus. Pattern recognition across unrelated domains. Comfort with ambiguity. Unconventional problem-framing. ADHD. Autism spectrum. Dyslexia. The kids told for decades that their brains were problems to be managed.

Pair that cognitive architecture with AI as a force multiplier and you don't get a coping mechanism. You get a superpower. The person with hyperfocus and an agent stack isn't compensating for their neurodivergence. They're deploying it.

Two Kinds of Durable

Karp identified two categories AI can't easily consume: Physical and vocational — the electrician, the machinist, the carpenter doing work that requires hands in the real world. And cognitively distinctive — the neurodivergent thinker, the creative, the strategist who works with AI so effectively they're not competing with it. They're directing it.

Everything in between — the competent generalist, the credentialed executor, the analyst producing reports — that's the exposure zone. Not because those people are stupid. But because 'competent and credentialed' was always a proxy signal, and AI just rendered the proxy obsolete.

The Phase Change Nobody Is Talking About Honestly

We're not in a productivity revolution. We're in a phase change. The last few quarters of AI adoption aren't linear — they're layers stacking simultaneously. Large enterprises operating in agentic mode. Mid-market stuck in 2025 thinking. 84 percent of the planet not yet started. That's not a technology adoption curve. That's civilizational stratification happening in real time.

Figure Out Which One You're Building Toward

If your work is physical and skilled — you're in a better position than most people realize. If your brain works differently than the institutional standard — you may be the most naturally positioned person in the room. If you're in the competent generalist zone and haven't started building genuine AI fluency — the urgency is real. Not because you'll be replaced tomorrow. But because the compounding starts now, and the people who started a year ago are already a year ahead.

The internet took a generation to mature. That gave skeptics time to find their footing. AI doesn't have that pace. The Eloi were comfortable. The Morlocks were capable. Figure out which one you're building toward.

Related reading: The Quarter Everyone Missed · 84% of Humanity Has Never Used AI · This Isn't Hype. This Is a Phase Change.