Surviving Within Artificial Intelligence's Useless Class

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A great mass of humans will lose their jobs as they’re replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation and they will become a “useless class” who will have to be kept “pacified” with distractions like virtual reality games, entertainment, and even drugs.

This was the controversial dystopian prediction of historian, philosopher, and Nostradamus-styled futurist, Yuval Noah Harari, in a series of talks he gave from 2017 to 2024. He asked in his usual devil’s-advocate manner:

“What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?”

His prediction seemed far-fetched only a year ago, but now it feels more like a description of our unfolding reality as AI has begun relentlessly culling jobs. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2020 predicts that 85 million jobs may be displaced by AI and automation by the end of 2025, while many of us have friends or acquaintances who have already suffered job loss or drastic loss of income due to AI.

In the arts, in which I work, I hear weekly reports from people who work in concept design, graphic arts, and journalism, about cuts in the value of their labor as employers have replaced them with cheap AI. Last week a post on X, said:

“I am an artist. AI took my job last month. My husband’s employer specialises in 'human capital management’ and is cutting 1759 jobs today—nearly 9% of its workforce to invest in AI. We are all waiting to hear if my husband will be one of them. I’m tired.”

A scriptwriter friend has discovered that six of her scripts have been scraped by AI systems without her consent, and after working in TV drama for 20 years, she’s being told that AI is being used to “streamline TV production.” As a result, she’s no longer being paid to write pitch documents, synopses, and “series bibles.” It’s all being done by junior staff now with the “efficiency tool” of AI.

Rather than hold out for the hope that Harari’s prediction of the “useless class” is falsely pessimistic, I would rather take it as an urgent warning and call to action. To ask: What will the social and psychological consequences be for those of us whose labor becomes replaced by AI systems and automation? How will we cope with the crisis of purpose that comes from being seen as unwanted and unneeded? And if we find ourselves becoming economically unnecessary, what could our governments or communities do to mitigate this? Failing that, what could we do about it, personally?

Learned Helplessness

Involuntary unemployment has a profound and measurable effect on mental health. A 2015 study by Kim and von dem Knesebeck found that unemployment significantly increases the risk of depression and suicide, and a study by Kposowa (2001) investigating links between unemployment, depression, and suicide has shown that after three years without work, unemployed men were a little over twice as likely to commit suicide as their employed counterparts, while after nine years of unemployment, “women were over three times more likely to kill themselves than their employed counterparts.”

Psychologists have been studying the effects of long-term unemployment on mental health since the 1970s. In "Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis" (1982) Marie Jahoda looked beyond the obvious economic consequences and demonstrated that prolonged unemployment can lead to a loss of identity, social contact, group connections, collective goals, and even a sense of time structure, all of which are essential for mental well-being.

On top of unemployment, being branded as economically "useless" can have profound psychological consequences, which may lead to "learned helplessness." This is a phenomenon, in which individuals, after repeated failures, become passive, ultimately becoming resigned to their negative circumstances. People who become conditioned into learned helplessness become trapped within it, believing that they are powerless to change their situation, even when opportunities to do so arise. They get locked within a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop, believing that their condition is inevitable and insurmountable; they lose all sense of purpose and suffer from demotivation, apathy, severe depression, anxiety, and often suicidal ideation.

Feeling economically irrelevant can also lead to a sense of shame and to the possibility of “acting out” violently. In The Managed Heart (1983), sociologist Arlie Hochschild argues that work is not just a source of income but a key component of identity and social status. Without meaningful work and goals, individuals feel inferior, leading to feelings of resentment and aggression.

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Harari's warning about the need to pacify the "useless class" with the distractions of games and drugs while perhaps intended as a provocation would have other disturbing consequences if ever put into practice. Virtual reality games and entertainment may provide temporary relief, but they can actually aggravate the underlying sense of purposelessness that comes from “killing time” with “nothing really to do.” Virtual and online games along with prolonged internet exposure, form addictive behaviours, even rewiring the brains of the young, as Jonathan Haidt has warned us. In fact, excessive reliance on such digital distractions, Haidt shows, only exacerbate feelings of emptiness and detachment. The opioid crisis in the United States, which has been linked to economic despair in declining communities, illustrates the dangers of using addictive substances to cope with psychological and existential issues. The attempted distraction becomes its own, much greater, problem.

The Left Brain Solution

Beyond Harari’s provocative solution of "games and drugs," other AI leaders from Altman, to Bostrom, to Musk have proposed the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to those whose work is displaced by the advance of AI. However, this is viewing AI-driven unemployment in mechanistic, managerial terms; in what the British psychiatrist, philosopher, literary scholar, and neuroscientist Iain McGlichrist, has called the “left-brained worldview.” This is the reduction of existential and psychological issues to mere managerial problems to be solved technically. As the expression goes—“a hammer sees everything as nails.”

In his two-volume work The Matter With Things, McGlichrist explores how the dominance of a narrowly rational, mechanistic, and reductionist perspective associated with the left hemisphere of the brain has shaped modern society, including the development and application of AI. The left brain processes information in a linear, algorithmic manner, lacking the contextual, empathetic, emotional, and intuitive understanding characteristic of the right hemisphere. Our current AI is even called “narrow AI”; its worldview is narrow, and if we fit ourselves into this left-brained vision of human life, humanity itself becomes narrowed. Why then trust the solutions for AI-driven unemployment that are offered by AI leaders and by AI itself?

What we need to do as a society facing the displacement of human labor by machines is to grasp that work is not merely a means of earning a living but a source of dignity, social connection, and deep meaning, while the loss of these could lead to widespread mental illness and social anger. "Solutions" like UBI may only serve to deepen this problem, as people become habituated to receiving minimal handouts that only increase dependence and reinforce the belief that now and for the foreseeable future, they have nothing to contribute to society and their survival is unnecessary or even parasitic. This "useless class," who learn how to accept a state of helplessness, will be kept alive, AI futurist and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, Nick Bostrom says, in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), like helpless children or pets:

"One can imagine a superintelligence playing a role akin to that of a human guardian for a child or a pet. The superintelligence might keep humans around for sentimental reasons, or because it finds us interesting or amusing, or because it has been programmed to value our welfare."

We should be preparing ourselves not just for AI and automation to wipe out unprecedented numbers of jobs, but for the technical solutions posed by the AI leaders to also pose a threat to human mental health. We need to start preparing now as a society, rather than hoping that others and not ourselves will be included in “the useless class.”