Jasmine Sun, The A.I. Fear Keeping Silicon Valley Up at Night, NYTimes, April 30, 2026. Sampled from the article:
The opening paragraph:
Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.
Silicon logic:
But even those who view the idea of a permanent underclass as overblown tell me that the meme contains a kernel of truth. [...]
Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect this scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.
If left to its own devices, Silicon Valley may summon a permanent underclass through its own market logic. If you believe that human-substituting A.I. is inevitable, then every company should race to be the one to build it — and claim a market valuation the size of the economy and then some.
Unimaginative techno-determinism:
Tech workers, for their part, are scrambling for lucrative A.I. jobs in hopes of securing financial freedom — even when they harbor ethical hangups. [...]
This apparent dissonance can be justified if you believe that the arc of technological progress is fixed. For instance, the founders of Mechanize, a once buzzy start-up with a mission to “enable the full automation of the economy,” argued in a blog post that “the only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves, or to wait for others to initiate it in our absence.”
Many A.I. employees are ultimately motivated by visions of a beautiful future: a promised land where goods are cheap, diseases are cured, and abundant machine labor liberates humans to enjoy lives of infinite leisure. But increasingly, they also worry about triggering a jobs apocalypse along the way. “There are some people who care about jobs and inequality because they really care about people. There are others who think this is going to lead to instability, insurrection and revolution, and that’s bad for business,” said a researcher who has worked at two frontier A.I. labs...
And, I would add, if and when that future arrives, we'll not be ready. Why? Because we train adults to become addicted to work mode (Homo economicus). As a result, they won't know what to do with the leisure (Homo ludens).
An emerging techno-federal oligarchy (a successor to Eisenhower's "industrial military-complex"?):
At the same time as A.I. erodes ordinary workers’ leverage, it may concentrate power and wealth in large companies and the U.S. government — two entities whose interests are increasingly linked. A.I.-related investments such as software and data centers accounted for 39 percent of U.S. economic growth in the first three-quarters of 2025, per an analysis by the St. Louis Fed. That gives the federal government a vested interest in sustaining the A.I. boom. Mr. Amodei acknowledges that this concentration can lead to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.”
In March, the company started the Anthropic Institute to house its teams working on economics, societal impact and frontier safety. The institute is led by Jack Clark, the affable British journalist turned A.I. billionaire and Anthropic co-founder, who seems to be replacing Mr. Amodei on the media tour of late. When we spoke, I asked Mr. Clark if he, too, expects A.I. to create a permanent underclass.
“This is basically a societal choice,” he replied. Like Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei, Mr. Clark sees the default path for A.I. as dire: one where we “let technology rip, and don’t think about the social effects until later.” But he also feels optimistic that sufficiently conscientious A.I. builders and policymakers can steer the ship away from the storm.
I have little faith in those (mythical) A.I. builders and policymakers. Meanwhile:
On the evening of Feb. 25, several dozen A.I. employees and civil society advocates gathered in a converted warehouse in San Francisco’s sleepy Dogpatch neighborhood to hear the Democratic pollster and strategist David Shor. The event was titled How to Prepare Our Politics for A.G.I., and doubled as a fund-raiser for a new “six-to-nine-month sprint” to rally Democratic politicians around the campaign issue of A.I. job displacement. [...]
While the American public ordinarily hesitates to support left-wing policies like a jobs guarantee or single-payer health care, A.I. seems to expand the political Overton window. “Right now, the argument is, ‘You’re all about to lose your jobs, and the choice is either you get nothing and starve, or we do something fair,’” Mr. Shor said. “People don’t want to be members of the permanent underclass.”
Not all policies are created equal, however. A universal basic income is unpopular, but a federal jobs guarantee has legs, Mr. Shor found. American voters don’t care about beating China, but they are excited about A.I. curing diseases. And, crucially, populism sells. In one of the top-performing political ads that Mr. Shor’s data firm tested, the nameless narrator declares: “We make the corporations and billionaires who profit from A.I. pay their fair share.” The ad concludes: “They work for the bots. We work for you.”
The near term:
If current trends continue, A.I. models and agents will be capable of performing a wider range of knowledge-work tasks at higher levels of complexity. At that point, A.I. shifts from automating single tasks to taking over entire roles. Hiring may slow in accounting, marketing, design, administrative work and other white-collar professions.
The work force will shift toward less automatable jobs where humans retain a comparative advantage — such as entrepreneurship, care work, the skilled trades and entertainment like sports and the performing arts. We will also see new jobs we haven’t imagined yet, in numbers we cannot predict. Many displaced workers will struggle to retrain, as they have in past automation waves. Education, health care and tax systems will require an overhaul if white-collar employment is no longer a reliable path to middle-class stability. [...]
But the debate over the most extreme scenarios conceals a more immediate threat: Even in the most limited case, A.I. will break the career ladder for millions of current and future workers, a prospect often waved away with euphemisms like “transitional friction.” The Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey puts it plainly: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
Class solidarity?
In this sense, A.I.’s broad capabilities foster a rare class solidarity between white-collar and blue-collar workers. When 20-something software engineers in San Francisco talk about escaping the permanent underclass, I hear them projecting concerns about their own precarity: What happens if the invisible hand of the market decides that my skills are no longer valuable? Who will catch me if I fall? For once, a rarefied class of employees — those used to being the automaters, not the automated — is reckoning with their potential obsolescence.
The final paragraphs:
Society’s ability to cushion A.I.’s disruption may determine whether we get to reap its gains at all. Without a safety net and a transition plan, blunt protectionism is workers’ rational response to automation. If you hear that A.I. will entrench a permanent underclass, you’ll do anything to stop it. [...]
And what if we don’t act? [...] In March, the Palantir chief executive, Alex Karp, spoke on a panel with the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien. “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest,” Mr. Karp said. “If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”
