The New Yorker:

An online joke reflects a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality.

By Kyle Chayka

The “lumpenproletariat,” according to “The Communist Manifesto,” is “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Lower than proletariat workers, the lumpenproletariat includes the indigent and the unemployable, those cast out of the workforce with no recourse, or those who can’t enter it in the first place, such as young workers in times of economic depression. According to some in Silicon Valley, this sorry category will soon encompass much of the human population, as a new lumpenproletariat—or, in modern online parlance, a “permanent underclass”—is created by the accelerating progress of artificial intelligence.

The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and use it to accomplish work once done by humans: anything from coding software to designing marketing campaigns to managing factories. Those without the same resources will be stuck with few alternatives. A sense of dread about this impending A.I. caste system has created a new urgency to get ahead while you still can. “You have 2 years to create a podcast in order to escape the permanent underclass,” one Silicon Valley meme account, @creatine_cycle, posted recently on X, suggesting that perhaps fame can still save you. “Honestly if you don’t want to be a part of the permanent underclass you should probably ship slop asap,” another person posted, using the slang term for any A.I.-generated or augmented content; in other words, start leaning in to A.I. products or stay poor forever. The creator of @creatine_cycle is Jayden Clark, a former musician turned entrepreneur working in San Francisco. His niche posts satirize the id of the tech industry, which he has seen change radically since the advent of the A.I. gold rush. In the future that A.I. hustlers envision, Clark told me, “nobody’s working anymore.” He continued, “whoever hasn’t gotten in, you have no other chance to climb the ladder.”

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