The Useless class

Just as the Industrial Revolution created the working class, automation could create a “global useless class,” Source

"Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite."

Harari, Yuval Noah. “How to Survive the 21st Century.” World Economic Forum, 24 Jan. 2020, www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/yuval-hararis-warning-davos-speech-future-predications/.

The rise of the Useless Class: as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at school or University, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition."