No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass
Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better,<br>what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent<br>underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be<br>automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people<br>cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join<br>one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future.
I want to argue this is a fantastically short-sighted view: if there is a<br>permanent underclass, you won’t escape it by owning property, or shares in<br>Anthropic or OpenAI, or guns, or anything else. And neither will the<br>billionaires. You, me, Sam Altman, Dario, everyone who is made of flesh and<br>blood, will be disempowered and replaced by machines.
The rest of this post elaborates the argument. First I explain how most workers<br>will be replaced (if it’s not obvious), then how the “permanent overclass” will<br>be disempowered, and finally how the government will be disempowered.
How Workers Will Be Replaced
Let’s start from this premise: AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at<br>human level or better, and cheaper than humans. I can’t prove this will happen,<br>but the goal of this post is to argue that if it happens, then everything else<br>follows. And it’s absurd to think it can’t. Five years ago this technology<br>barely existed: if you sent a transcript of a conversation with Claude Fable<br>back in time to 2020 or thereabouts, nobody would believe it was real.
So, the year is 2036 (likely earlier), businesses have replaced most human<br>workers with AI in the pursuit of profit maximization. Corporations are a small<br>raft of human executives, floating on top of a vast ocean of AIs and robots. The<br>AIs can do all cognitive and physical work at human level or above, and they are<br>cheaper overall.
Imagine a pyramid. At the base you have the AIs and robots doing all economic<br>activity. At the top you have the state, which has the monopoly on violence. The<br>state enforces, and therefore can alter the definition of, property rights. In<br>the middle you have this hair-thin layer of people with shares in the companies<br>that foomed and catabolized the whole economy: the permanent overclass. They own<br>the companies, maybe sit on the board, some might still be CEOs but it’s a<br>purely ceremonial role since AIs do all the actual organization work.
Where are, you know, the rest of us, in this picture? Well, the future doesn’t<br>need us. Maybe there’s enough human demand that we’re not all jobless but<br>rather underemployed, in some dead-end economic diverticulum. The relational<br>economy: you’re paid to put a human face on things, or, doctors keep their job<br>as a human liability crumple zone around the AI. Or maybe the dead<br>Internet becomes de facto UBI and we’re all engagement farmers. Anyways,<br>we’re not dead yet, but we are completely disempowered, and there is zero social<br>mobility since there are no more talent ladders to climb. Maybe sometimes one of<br>the elites notices a bright young thing among the underclass and elevates<br>them.
You might object: if we’re all jobless, who’s paying for everything? This is<br>trivially answered: the state acts like the heart, taxes are venous blood and<br>welfare is oxygenated arterial blood. The government pays Raytheon for missiles,<br>the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters,<br>mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each<br>other. The government takes a cut of all economic activity, pays out welfare,<br>the unemployed masses buy food and pay rent, the supermarkets, farms, logistics<br>network, etc. are all staffed by AI.
How The Rich Will Be Replaced
Say that in the next five years from now you become immensely wealthy, perhaps<br>by gambling on shitcoins or scamming money from the government. Or you join one<br>of the big labs and get a bunch of shares in a company that might be worth<br>trillions of dollars. You escaped the permanent underclass. Is your place in the<br>future secure?
The base of the pyramid is there for material reasons: the machines do all the<br>work. The top of the pyramid is there because the state is needed to enforce<br>property rights and keep the peace (this is rather a deep question of political<br>philosophy—why does the state exist?—but I hope you’ll forgive me if I<br>just assert it and move on, I need to get to the part where we are all<br>disempowered).
What’s the middle for? What role does the permanent overclass play? They are not<br>economically productive: machines do all the work. If some of them are still<br>working, it’s just an anachronism, because if machines can do all cognitive work<br>they can be a C-level executive too. The old aristocracy provided officers for<br>the military, but machines can both fight and plan the wars. And similarly<br>they’re not needed to staff the government. They’re not even culturally<br>productive. So what are they there for? The base doesn’t...