CONCEPT
The Useless Class
Harari's term for populations rendered economically irrelevant by automation—not exploited or oppressed but without function, contributing nothing the economy values, facing an identity crisis more corrosive than unemployment because it is existential.
In 2017, Harari predicted that artificial intelligence and automation would create a 'massive new unworking class' within the twenty-first century—people 'devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.' He named them the 'useless class,' and the phrase was designed to offend precisely the sensibility it described. Not 'displaced' (implying temporariness), not 'transitioning' (implying destination), but useless—without use, function, or the economic relevance that modern societies treat as the basis for social standing, identity, and voice. The useless are not victims of injustice in traditional forms. They are casualties of efficiency. The economy doesn't need their labor. The military doesn't need their bodies. The political system, increasingly algorithmic, may not need their votes. They are not unemployed—they are unemployable, lacking skills the market values and incapable of acquiring such skills faster than AI renders them obsolete again.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism