The Useless Class

In the AI Story

When Harari offered the prediction in 2017, it felt distant—futurist provocation, decades away. The 2025-26 AI capabilities made the mechanism visible ahead of schedule. Not mass unemployment (which did not occur), but the compression of the expertise premium—the gradual devaluation of human cognitive labor as AI raises the floor of competent performance. The dynamic: before AI, senior and junior developers occupied different economic categories because they produced different-quality outputs. The senior's code was cleaner, more robust, architecturally sound. The quality gap justified a two-to-three-times salary differential. AI compressed the gap. An AI-assisted junior can now generate code eighty percent as good as an unassisted senior. The market asks: does the remaining twenty percent justify the remaining salary differential? For most commercial purposes, the answer is no. Eighty-percent quality at forty-percent cost is superior economics. The senior's advantage remains real; it stops being worth paying for.

This is the useless class in insidious form: not unemployed but undervalued. Still working, still producing, but producing output the market values less with each AI improvement. The psychological cost may exceed outright unemployment, because unemployment provides clear narrative ('I lost my job; the machine took it'), while undervaluation provides only vague fungibility ('I still have a job; I just can't explain why it pays less each year'). The identity crisis is Harari's deepest concern. For centuries, especially post-Industrial Revolution, humans have derived purpose, standing, self-understanding from what they do. 'What do you do?' is synonymous with 'Who are you?' When the machine can do what you do—only faster, cheaper, at scale—the question loses its power to orient. If your answer is 'I do what a machine does, only more slowly and expensively,' the identity collapses.

Segal's twelve-year-old asking 'Mom, what am I for?'—not about careers but about existential purpose—is the useless-class problem at the threshold of identity formation. The child watches machines do homework, compose songs, write stories better than she can, and lies in bed wondering what remains. Segal's answer—that humans are for the questions, for caring, for originating purpose—is philosophically coherent. Whether it is economically viable depends on institutions that do not yet exist. The gap between philosophical coherence and economic viability is where the useless class takes shape.

Origin

Harari introduced the useless-class concept in Homo Deus (2015), developing it through essays and lectures (2017-2024). The phrase intentionally provokes: 'useless' is brutal, designed to cut through euphemism ('transitioning workers,' 'reskilling opportunities') and name the structural reality—populations without economic function in a system that allocates standing, resources, and voice according to economic contribution. The concept synthesizes Marx's reserve army of labor, technological unemployment literature, and Harari's signature move—extrapolating present trends to uncomfortable endpoints.

Key Ideas

Not exploited but irrelevant. The useless class is not oppressed (which implies a relationship, however degraded); it is superfluous—outside the system of production entirely.

Mechanism: compression of the expertise premium. AI does not eliminate jobs overnight; it gradually devalues human cognitive labor by raising the 'good enough' floor until excellence stops being worth paying for.

Identity crisis more than economic crisis. Modern selfhood is built on productive function. Remove function, remove the foundation of identity—producing existential vertigo no unemployment benefit addresses.

Arrived early in mechanism, not in scale. The full useless class (millions permanently unemployable) has not materialized. But the mechanism generating it—good-enough thresholds, premium compression, devaluation of depth—is observable now.

Requires new basis for human worth. If economic contribution ceases to be the currency of standing, the species needs a replacement fiction. Consciousness-based identity—you are valuable because you wonder, care, ask—is the candidate. Whether it can be institutionalized is open.