"Among anxious laptop workers, these trends have fed half-ironic chatter about the coming of a “permanent underclass”: Once AI renders virtually all human labor commercially useless, most people will be condemned to eternal subjugation and precarity. No company will pay you for work that a robot can do better. And no market economy will let you climb the income ladder if your labor has no value. In Silicon Valley, such reasoning has generated a peculiarly dystopian variant of hustle culture: Make your fortune in the next five years, and you’ll claim a place in the perpetual aristocracy of AI owners — fail, and you’ll forever be at their mercy.

All these claims are wildly speculative. It’s not certain that today’s AI labs have functioning business models, much less the wherewithal to develop omnicompetent robots. Yet of all the nightmare scenarios spun by fatalistic futurists, AGI-induced neofeudalism strikes me as among the most plausible.

AGI may or may not decide to liquidate the human race. But it will tank the value of human labor, more or less by definition. We don’t know how ordinary people will fare in a world where the wealthy can do without their talents and exertions. But it is reasonable to worry that the answer is “not too well.” After all, there are already societies in which workers enjoy relatively little economic leverage over elites. And they typically aren’t nice places to be an ordinary person.

It’s therefore worth examining precisely how AI could generate an immutable oligarchy —and what can be done to prevent that from happening."

vox.com/the-highlight/466025/a…

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