You will not be a member of the permanent underclass
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You will not be a member of the permanent underclass
Ozy Brennan<br>Apr 05, 2026
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I see some people worrying about being in the “permanent underclass.” AI will be better than humans at everything, and automate all the jobs, and then no one will be able to earn money through their work. For the rest of human civilization, everyone will inherit exactly the class position that their ancestors had in 2026.<br>I also see people worrying about the absence of meaning or purpose. Humans won't be able to create value for each other or AIs, so we won't have anything to do except play extremely addictive video games and goon to our AI anime waifus.<br>Thing of Things is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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The vast majority of “permanent underclass” believers are ignorant of basic economic theory. Almost no arguments about the permanent underclass engage with anything that’s relevant to whether humans will have jobs. The discourse enrages me, so I’m writing this post in the hopes that people will stop annoying me with stupid arguments.<br>Now, I want to be clear what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that humans would be so economically valuable that AIs would selfishly refrain from killing us. I don’t think that’s true. I’m saying that, conditional on humans continuing to exist, standard economics suggests that we will have jobs.<br>Incorrect Arguments For Why Humans Won’t Have Jobs
Some people say that AIs will do all the work, so humans won’t have any work to do. This argument assumes that there is a fixed set of “work,” and once all of the work is done no one will have any jobs anymore. This is called the lump of labor fallacy.<br>In 1400, about half of British people were employed in agriculture. Today, 1% of British people are employed in agriculture.
Does Britain have a 49% unemployment rate? No! Because we invented new kinds of work—often work unimaginable to people in 1400, such as HR consultant, Pilates instructor, and closed-end fund discount arbitrageur.<br>It’s difficult to predict what the new jobs would be, for the same reason that it would be difficult for a peasant in 1400 to predict the existence of closed-end fund discount arbitrageurs. But as people become wealthier, they want more and more specific things.<br>Some people say that AI labor will be so cheap that we won’t be able to afford to hire humans for anything. I think this argument shows a fundamental confusion about the definition of the word “cheap.” If AI labor is so inexpensive that Dario Amodei can pay for his entire present lifestyle with a crumpled dollar bill he pulled out of the couch, then Dario Amodei has a lot of wealth going spare. He can just afford, if he so fancies, to make like a victorious Roman general on a triumph and hire me to follow him around whispering in his ear “remember the universe will die.” Who cares if this costs 25% of his income? What the fuck else is he going to spend it on?<br>(I would be so good at following people around whispering in their ear “remember the universe will die.” Dario, call me)<br>The “law of comparative advantage” is that, even if you are better than someone else at everything, you can still benefit from trading with them. You can see a worked example in this introductory economics textbook, but the intuition is simple.<br>All work has an opportunity cost. That is, at any time we have only a certain amount of compute, data centers, robots, drones, etc. If you hire an AI to follow Dario Amodei around whispering “remember the universe will die” in his ear, that uses up a robot that can’t be used in a factory or cleaning a house or doing scientific research. Sure, you can make more robots, but you only have so many robots at any given time, and eventually you run low on robot-making material.<br>If humans are incompetent at almost everything, humans have a very low opportunity cost. So it makes sense to hire the very cheap humans for the jobs that humans are still capable of.<br>These jobs might not pay enough to financially support the humans in question, but remember we’re assuming here that humans don’t go extinct. I think it’s very possible that humans are too economically valueless to pay for our own upkeep, and also AIs don’t terminally value human well-being. But then we go extinct,1 and you won’t be around to be a member of the permanent underclass. If you are still alive, then either:<br>Society is so unimaginably wealthy that humans can financially support themselves with whatever jobs end up being their comparative advantage. You being in the permanent underclass just means you don’t have a personal O’Neill cylinder orbiting Jupiter.
Society implemented a universal basic income or something, and you don’t have to support yourself with your job, but you can still have one if you want one.
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