/Technology

The trap in all this "permanent underclass" conversation is that it keeps framing the problem as something new. It isn't. What AI does is accelerate a concentration that has been underway since the 1980s with the financialization of the economy. The difference now is speed and generality: this time there is no cognitive sector left to retreat to. The point nobody wants to say plainly is that the problem is not technological, it is one of ownership. Whoever holds the models, the training data, and the infrastructure captures the productivity gains entirely. The worker who was replaced has no stake in the asset that replaced them. That is the real discontinuity from previous industrial revolutions: a factory needs workers to operate, a language model needs nobody once it is trained. The UBI debate is symptomatic of this confusion. UBI is a redistributive response to an ownership problem. It is the equivalent of paying unemployment benefits to someone who was expropriated without compensation. It solves subsistence in the short term, it does not solve the intergenerational wealth accumulation that will calcify social hierarchies permanently. What should be at the center of the debate is co-ownership: sovereign AI funds, mandatory worker equity in companies that replace them, public licensing of models trained on public data. None of these mechanisms are technically difficult. They are politically impossible as long as capital remains concentrated where it is. For the Global South the picture is worse, because it is not just domestic unemployment: it is the destruction of cheap labor as a competitive argument. Angola, Bangladesh, Vietnam competed for industrial investment by offering low-cost work. That argument is over. Industrial AI does not need geography or low wages. What remains are natural resources and consumer markets, which are exactly the assets the Global North has always controlled through other means. The permanence of the underclass does not come from the technology itself. It comes from who arrives at the future without assets. It has always been that way. AI just made the timeline shorter and the scale larger.