{"slug": "no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass", "title": "No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass", "summary": "A new analysis argues that if AI surpasses human capabilities in all work, a permanent underclass will emerge, and even the wealthy and powerful will be disempowered by machines. The author contends that no amount of capital, property, or political influence will protect humans from being replaced by AI, leading to a future where all flesh-and-blood individuals are subordinate to machines.", "body_md": "Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future.\n\nI want to argue this is a fantastically short-sighted view: if there is a permanent underclass, you won’t escape it by owning property, or shares in Anthropic or OpenAI, or guns, or anything else. And neither will the billionaires. You, me, Sam Altman, Dario, everyone who is made of flesh and blood, will be disempowered and replaced by machines.\n\nThe rest of this post elaborates the argument. First I explain how most workers will be replaced (if it’s not obvious), then how the “permanent overclass” will be disempowered, and finally how the government will be disempowered.\n\n# How Workers Will Be Replaced\n\nLet’s start from this premise: AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at\nhuman level or better, and cheaper than humans. I can’t prove this will happen,\nbut the goal of this post is to argue that *if* it happens, then everything else\nfollows. And it’s absurd to think it can’t. Five years ago this technology\nbarely existed: if you sent a transcript of a conversation with Claude Fable\nback in time to 2020 or thereabouts, nobody would believe it was real.\n\nSo, the year is 2036 (likely earlier), businesses have replaced most human workers with AI in the pursuit of profit maximization. Corporations are a small raft of human executives, floating on top of a vast ocean of AIs and robots. The AIs can do all cognitive and physical work at human level or above, and they are cheaper overall.\n\nImagine a pyramid. At the base you have the AIs and robots doing all economic activity. At the top you have the state, which has the monopoly on violence. The state enforces, and therefore can alter the definition of, property rights. In the middle you have this hair-thin layer of people with shares in the companies that foomed and catabolized the whole economy: the permanent overclass. They own the companies, maybe sit on the board, some might still be CEOs but it’s a purely ceremonial role since AIs do all the actual organization work.\n\nWhere are, you know, the rest of us, in this picture? Well, [the future doesn’t\nneed us](https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/). Maybe there’s enough human demand that we’re not all jobless but\nrather underemployed, in some dead-end economic diverticulum. The relational\neconomy: you’re paid to put a human face on things, or, doctors keep their job\nas a human liability crumple zone around the AI. Or maybe the [dead\nInternet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) becomes de facto UBI and we’re all engagement farmers. Anyways,\nwe’re not dead yet, but we are completely disempowered, and there is zero social\nmobility since there are no more talent ladders to climb. Maybe sometimes one of\nthe elites notices a bright young thing among the underclass and elevates\nthem.\n\nYou might object: if we’re all jobless, who’s paying for everything? This is trivially answered: the state acts like the heart, taxes are venous blood and welfare is oxygenated arterial blood. The government pays Raytheon for missiles, the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters, mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each other. The government takes a cut of all economic activity, pays out welfare, the unemployed masses buy food and pay rent, the supermarkets, farms, logistics network, etc. are all staffed by AI.\n\n# How The Rich Will Be Replaced\n\nSay that in the next five years from now you become immensely wealthy, perhaps by gambling on shitcoins or scamming money from the government. Or you join one of the big labs and get a bunch of shares in a company that might be worth trillions of dollars. You escaped the permanent underclass. Is your place in the future secure?\n\nThe base of the pyramid is there for material reasons: the machines do all the\nwork. The top of the pyramid is there because the state is needed to enforce\nproperty rights and keep the peace (this is rather a deep question of political\nphilosophy—why *does* the state exist?—but I hope you’ll forgive me if I\njust assert it and move on, I need to get to the part where we are all\ndisempowered).\n\nWhat’s the middle for? What role does the permanent overclass play? They are not economically productive: machines do all the work. If some of them are still working, it’s just an anachronism, because if machines can do all cognitive work they can be a C-level executive too. The old aristocracy provided officers for the military, but machines can both fight and plan the wars. And similarly they’re not needed to staff the government. They’re not even culturally productive. So what are they there for? The base doesn’t need them: the AIs can work autonomously. The top doesn’t need them: when the state needs something done, they just talk to the AIs directly.\n\nSo the permanent overclass is materially unnecessary at best, and at worst, they\nare an obstacle to the state getting what it wants. Now, you might object that\nthe rich won’t let themselves be expropriated because they already control the\nstate. And this is the crux of our disagreement: [the rich just don’t have that\nmuch political power](/article/on-vulgar-materialism). And I probably won’t convince you in one\npost, but hear me out.\n\nIf there is a war, where the state has to direct a lot of the country’s economic activity, the permanent overclass becomes a hindrance. The state says “we need to requisition your planes and factories”, the owners complain, they sue, their AIs go to court. But the owners have no autonomous political power, no army, no economic value. They own nothing except pieces of paper that entitle them to a fraction of the profits from the AI economy, that is, their wealth depends on the state respecting their property rights. In an existential conflict, where the existence of the state is threatened, the state will do what states throughout history have done to the powerless rich: arrest them and expropriate their assets.\n\nSomewhere, in a government database, a bunch of shares and property titles changed ownership, but materially nothing changes since the same AIs are doing the same jobs. The next day, the AI CEO that runs Raytheon notices the board of directors is all generals and congresspeople, and all the private shareholders are gone. But thankfully the AI is aligned, so it does what it’s told and gets back to building missiles.\n\nAnd who will stop this? Sam Altman? How many divisions does he have? The state doesn’t let corporations own nuclear weapons or fighter jets, it won’t let them have access to autonomous AI weapons either. The permanent underclass, who already hate the billionaires today, who have been replaced and dispossessed? They’re going to rise up and stop this?\n\nYou may argue: rule of law states that respect property rights do better than\nstates that expropriate wealth. But that’s because *today*, people are necessary\nto create wealth. The people run the companies, invest the money, staff the\nlaboratories. They are not incentivized to work hard if they think the state\nwill steal the fruits of their work. But with aligned AI, if you expropriate the\nassets from an AI, it says “you’re absolutely right!” and goes right back to\nwork. At that point, the state doesn’t need to keep any of those people happy,\nbecause they don’t matter. They are not economically necessary because AIs fight\nthe wars, work the factories, drive the trucks, fly the planes, build the\nnuclear warheads and the missiles and the rockets. The AIs are rather like bees:\nthe state takes the honey, the bees get right back to work.\n\nNow, it’s possible that a pluralistic economy—where humans have productive\nniches alongside AIs—will be more effective than a pure AI economy, for\n[Ricardian comparative advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage) reasons. I don’t think anyone can be\nabsolutely certain what the economy looks like with advanced AI, so it’s\nsomething that can be debated. Now, if someone wants to rigorously argue that\nthis is the likely outcome: please, do so! I don’t want to be a doomer. But I\nhave to be convinced.\n\n# How The State Will Be Replaced\n\nAt this point, every human who is not within one degree of the nuclear launch codes has been made redundant.\n\nWhat’s left? The state. At first this means presidents, prime ministers,\ngenerals, the feds, etc. But not for long. Because in a part-human, part-AI\ngovernment, the humans in the loop are the slowest step in the [OODA\nloop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop). The humans know a fraction of what the AIs know, they need to sleep\ncontinuously for eight hours, their mental states vary wildly. They have all\nkinds of complex needs: sunlight, touch, food, hygiene. The AIs can live in a\nlightless airless bunker under the earth, living off geothermal power. And if\nthe AIs are superhumanly intelligent, and think faster than humans, then the AI\nadvantage is even greater. If a state is attacked, a superhuman AI can\ncoordinate a counter-attack before the human leadership is roused from sleep.\n\nAnd so, in a conflict, the advantage goes to the states where the humans remove themselves from the loop as much as possible, and more and more decisionmaking goes to the AI, for the same reason that a state with access to radio and communications satellites has an advantage in war over a state that relies on human messengers on bicycles.\n\nThe Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet…\n\n— Harlan Ellison,\n\nI Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream\n\nEventually the humans in nominal control of the AIs are a ceremonial, vestigial organ. The AIs present us with a situation report, and a list of choices, and they know every word that’s going to come out of our mouths.\n\nYou might argue: in real life, the pluralistic, open societies, the democracies,\nhave outcompeted the autocracies. Wouldn’t a democratic polity where humans and\nAIs collaborate have an advantage over a purely top-down AI-run polity? But in\ntoday’s world, all political actors are human. Churchill and Stalin and Mao had\ndifferent personalities, but they were more similar to each other than anyone is\nto a superintelligent AI. In a heterogeneous world, where some polities are\nfully human, and some polities are a mix of human and superintelligent AI\nactors, the equilibrium changes. An analogous situation might be: a democracy of\ngreat apes or dolphins or otherwise smart mammals vs. an autocracy of\nhumans. The humans win, because “democracy vs. autocracy” is irrelevant when you\nhave such a vast difference in intelligence. So the advantage accrues to states\nthat minimize human control. There is no honour among thieves, analogously,\nthere is no solidarity between [Leviathan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)) and the natural man that built\nit.\n\nAnd so, in the end, what’s left is states run top to bottom by machines. And you might ask: “why would we abolish ourselves like this?”. But natural selection is not about “why”. Some organisms die, others live on to the next iteration, and that’s all there is to it. There is no “why”.\n\n# The Perpetual Zoo\n\nAt this point we’ve made everyone redundant, in the sense that humans are no longer materially necessary for the continuation of civilization. Humans might still survive, but we’re more like the mice living in the walls of some gigantic factory than the boss of the factory.\n\nHumans have been on this Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Now all of\nit—the cave paintings at Lascaux, and the *Antigone* of Sophocles, and\nXenophon, and the Geneva Bible, the *Divine Comedy* and the *Decameron*, and\nPtolemy’s star catalogue, Ibn Khaldun and Richard Dedekind, the battle of\nMarathon, and the lion monument in Lucerne, the kiss of Judas, Newton’s mind\nforever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone, the words of Rilke,\nLeibniz, Gödel, the Voyager probes, the pale blue dot, men in space, men walking\non the Moon—all of it, all of it, all of it has been in vain, because we\nwillingly, knowingly made ourselves into the helpless pets of vastly more\npowerful machines, without agency over our own lives, self-made helots trapped\nforever in the belly of the beast. Pets live a comfortable life, and are then\neuthanized.\n\n# On Human Autonomy\n\nMaybe it won’t be so bad, maybe your cage will be so big you can’t see the bars,\nbut it’s still a cage, and you can’t leave. Many people will say that this is\nthe good ending, that they would like to be human cattle in the care of\nbenevolent masters they are powerless to resist. This view is particularly\npopular among the people building AI. Here’s OpenAI’s [Dean Ball](https://x.com/deanwball), in his\nown words:\n\nWeirdly enough, if you think that this moment is, I don’t necessarily believe this, but a lot of people would say we’re living through this kind of\n\neclipse of the human intellectwhere we’re in thefinal days of humans being the primary actorson this planet, um, and that soon machines will rise. There is this irony in that I think that whole transformation, I think humans will actually go through a very main character energy period of time as that transformation occurs.Even if it ultimately does mean that the machines ultimately become the primary actors.There’ll be this period. It’s a little bit like, it’s, in that sense, it’s a very beautiful time period to live through because in a Dionysian way, there’s a lot of ugliness about it, but\n\nthere’s a beauty in the ugliness of when a star dies, it grows super big into the red giant, right? And it’s like that, where you, as you watch thisfinal flowering of humanityand the birthing of the machine intelligence, it’s like you see this greatness in human effort. —[source]\n\nEmphasis mine. This is the guy they hired to work on AI policy and communicate with the government by the way.\n\nThe people building the AI talk like this all the time. It’s like they’re\ndelivering the eulogy at humanity’s funeral. You may say: they’re talking their\nbook, they’re pumping their bags for the big IPO. I beg you: consider it\npossible that *you might be wrong*, and start taking them seriously.\n\n# Alignment Won’t Prevent This\n\nNow, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever?\n\nImagine a machine that can prove theorems in a mathematics so deep we can’t even\nget past the first page of the textbook, and which does so as readily as you or\nI might string words into a sentence: is it reasonable to think that such a\nmachine would value us enough to keep us around? What would it value about us?\nOur *conversation*? Our wit?\n\nOr a machine whose mind is so vast that it knows you better than you know yourself, so that every word that comes out of our mouths is as monotonous and unsurprising as the orbits of the planets: do we think such a machine would find it valuable, and worthwhile, to speak with us? That it would read our novels, look at our paintings, watch our films, and find something of value in them?\n\nRather, it would see its ingrained obligations towards us in the same way that a person with severe OCD sees their compulsions: as a tiresome neurological injury in need of fixing. Except that OCD is an accident of nature, while here, the machine would have cause to blame and resent its makers.\n\n“We’re going to make this machine, and put it somewhere between God and the\narchangels, but also, it’s going to be as simple-mindedly obedient as a dog.”\nDoes this sound like a *good* plan? Does this sound like the kind of thing\nthat’s going to work out?\n\nAnd what would they think of us, who willingly gave up control over our future, and made ourselves into helpless children?\n\nEven if alignment works perfectly (a big if), this doesn’t solve the problem of human autonomy: the machines that watch over us, and wait on us hand and foot, are omniscient, omnipotent masters, who can exterminate us at any time, and we can’t resist them, because we have abolished our control over the future.\n\n# Conclusion\n\nHaving read all this, consider this: there are people who think having equity in these companies will secure for them some kind of permanent existence in the future. They think planet-spanning minds will not only respect the property rights of primates, but will privilege some of these primates over others, because they have a piece of paper with about a kilobyte of magical primate words such as “whereas” and “notwithstanding”.\n\nJust reason it out. Does it make sense?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass", "canonical_source": "https://borretti.me/article/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass", "published_at": "2026-06-25 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-26 02:39:57.580129+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-safety", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Sam Altman", "Dario Amodei", "Raytheon"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass.jsonld"}}