WE ARE NOT USELESS

Fighting Back Against Human Replacement Technology

A great mass of humans will lose their jobs as they’re replaced by 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 – 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?”

The prediction seemed far-fetched only a year ago, but now feels more like a description of our unfolding reality as companies adopting AI have begun relentlessly culling jobs in what amounts to a new stage of techno-capitalism, with the short-sighted goal of Human Replacement.

While there are no overall aggregated data yet on the actual numbers of job losses from across the many sectors and many nations, and while tech leaders like Altman make investment-seeking exaggerated boasts that AI could “replace 70% of jobs”, in the real world many of us have friends or acquaintances who have suffered job loss or drastic loss of income due to AI.

The AI critic Brian Merchant, author of the viral substack The AI jobs crisis is here, now. has recently started an open blog page where people are invited to share their stories of AI-caused unemployment – Did AI Kill your job? (If so, I want to hear about it. Send your story to AIKilledMyJob@pm.me). I would ask you to contribute to that and share your story if AI has impacted you.

In the field of the arts, in which I work, I hear near daily reports from people who work in concept design, 3D art, graphic arts, blogging and journalism, about cuts in the value of their labour as employers have replaced them with free generative AI content.

Some are throwing in the towel, as one graphic artist friend said, “I just can’t compete with these AIs that were built on scraping our art. I’m done. I’m out.” I know a journalist who is looking for a new line of work after having seen how well DeepSeek and Grok can write copy. A social media friend repeatedly contacts me to ask if “is it over?” By this he means the hope of ever having a career in the arts. He’s twenty-three and feels lost and suicidal on-and-off with every news story that comes in about AI. How can he get started in his chosen career if AI demonetises the entire sector and steals all the content? Why should he even try to make original art when so called AI-artists using generative AI can outcompete him in mere minutes? Why should he spend years polishing his skills and finding his voice?

Rather than hold out some hope that Harari’s prediction of the “useless class” is falsely pessimistic, I would rather be stoic about it and take it as a useful, if daunting warning. To ask: what will the social and psychological consequences be for us of becoming replaced by AI systems and automated technology; of becoming humans who are seen as being a useless, unwanted, un-needed and replaceable?

If this happens, how will we cope with the ensuing crisis of purpose? And if we find ourselves becoming economically unnecessary within a civilisation that no longer needs our labour or voices, what could our governments or communities do to mitigate the crisis? Failing govt action, what could we do about it, personally?

Are We In The "Useless Class"?

Harari’s provocative quip that in the future we will have to pacify the useless class and “keep them happy with drugs and computer games”, is both in poor taste, and at the same time a prediction of what lack of any forward-looking social policy may end up resulting in. Ad-hoc pacification, distraction, keeping the “class” who contribute nothing to the high-tech society entertained, drugged, and busy doing nothing with any purpose. He may have been echoing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where civilians are pacified en-masse with the drug Soma but the affinity here points to an increased role for the social engineer class. Specialists in “the management of the useless class.”

A further quote from Harari’s public talks on this subject asks the dark question underlying this: “the economic question of the 21^st century will be what do we need humans for? Or at least what do we need so many humans for?”

Who is the “we” who asks this question, but the implied overclass of the social engineers, the AI assisted society planners who will then decide how the underclasses live.

Harari is not the first, or the only one, to have made such disturbing predictions. Economist Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in The Second Machine Age (2014), argues that AI and automation will displace workers, stating “When technology advances too quickly for education to keep up, inequality generally rises”.

Goldman Sachs has forecast that AI may replace 300 million jobs in the coming decades – a staggering 9.1% of all jobs worldwide. 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.

According to the Oxford Martin School, 47% of US workers are at risk of losing their jobs to automation over the coming decade, while a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management predicts that by 2030, 14% of employees worldwide will have been forced to change their career because of AI.

Harari's double-edged warning about the "useless class" is not merely about unemployment but about the social and psychological consequences of economic irrelevance. His quip about the need for ‘distractions’ suggests that without meaningful work, individuals deprived of a way to make a living may fall into widespread despair and social unrest.

We seem to have forgotten warnings from the long history of our culture in which idleness and sloth were seen as deadly temptations: “the devil finds work for idle hands” said the Biblical proverb. A modern expression of this was summarised by Brynjolfsson when he said: “Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

Generations before us, civil rights leaders observed the scourge of long-term unemployment on minority underclasses and the human cost of being labelled as economically unwanted and “useless”, "The hardest work in the world is being out of work" said social worker and activist Whitney M. Young, and he spoke from observing the fracturing of cohesion within Black American communities in the 1950s and 60s caused by long-term and ethnically biased unemployment.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, predicted that technological progress would lead to widespread unemployment, which he termed "technological unemployment." But Keynes, the eternal techno-optimist, tried to believe that this would be a temporary phase of capitalist evolution, leading eventually to specialist-led economy and a leisure society.

Keynes’ utopianism, while echoed by some “thought leaders” at today’s World Economic Forum - and within the techno-accelerationist and e/acc mindset of companies like Space X and Open AI - offers little hope to those who are sliding into AI-induced unemployment. Who among us could endure unemployment while waiting-it-out for a decade in the hope that AI technology will one day deliver us the land of plenitude promised to us by tech CEOs and technocrats.

The "Useless Feeders" and Human Replacement

Harari’s futurist thought-provocations ride a dangerous edge and it can be no accident that his use of the concept "useless class" alludes to disturbing historical precedents. The Nazis categorized certain groups as "useless feeders" (Nutzlose Esser). These were people forced into the categories of the incurably ill, the physically or mentally disabled, the emotionally unfit, the elderly and infirm and they were deemed by the regime to be economically burdensome, "unfit" for society and unworthy of life. This led to the Nazi T4 euthanasia program, which murdered over 70,000 people within its “final solution”. The Nazis also referred to these victims as “useless eaters.”

Harari may have chosen to echo this expression to raise the stakes in the debate or he may have done it carelessly, but the parallels are unsettling: Both the scenario of an AI “useless class” and the Nazi “useless feeders” involve the re-categorization of human beings based on mere utility according to the “plan for all”. They define being “useless” as a terminal state, becoming permanent for a specific sub-group of humans who are considered a waste of resources in a more advanced and planned society.

The parallel hints that the advance of technology could merge with the control mechanisms and totalistic planning we saw within 20^th century totalitarianism. So, techno-capital fuses with the techno state. The result is technofascism, powered by the machine-logic of AI-calculated utilitarianism. The summation of all your life abilities is calculated within the algorithms as either productive or unproductive for the survival and growth of the techno-state.

And this begs the questions of why any society geared towards the calculable optimisation of positive outcomes for the majority - as the tech-optimists and tech-utopians describe their dreamed-of society – should have to endure the continuing problem of those who are non-productive and who contribute a net-loss?

The utopian optimism and assumption of a higher class of human-engineers lurks behind Harari’s question: “Why so many humans?” And it leads back again to lethal pseudo-sciences of eugenics and dysgenics, and to the class of eugenicists who calculate the value and the fate of the lives others.

Learned Helplessness

Moving from the macro to the personal level, what does knowing that your society considers you “useless” and that your future is a fated state of powerlessness do to a human being?

Being branded as economically "useless" can have profound psychological consequences and may be connected to the psychological condition of "learned helplessness" - a phenomenon studied in animals and later in humans, in which individuals, after repeated failures, rejections and subjugations, become passive, ultimately becoming resigned to their circumstances. Learned helplessness is the darks flip-side of “positive reinforcement” – instead of chanting, “I am a good worthwhile person” every day to reprogramme your mind into positivity, you are being told on a daily basis that your life is a waste of other people’s resources, that you are worse than worthless and nothing you can ever do will get you out of this state. You are a waste of space.

What is more, people who become conditioned into learned helplessness, become trapped within it, believing that there is no point in even attempting to change their negative situation, even when opportunities to do so arise. They believe that their uncomfortable condition is inevitable and insurmountable, they lose all sense of purpose beyond surviving in this trapped state. This condition is closely linked to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.

Many of us, including myself, have experienced this for a short period in our lives and have been fortunate enough to have broken out of the circular cycle before our brains “learned” that our only future was one of defeat, resignation and helplessness.

Learned helplessness comes into play with long term unemployment and psychologists have been studying the effects of unemployment and purposelessness 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, time structure, social contact, group connections and collective goals, all of which are essential for mental well-being. You actually start to lose all sense of direction and time, all sense of meaningful goals. Since nothing I do contributes to society, why not sleep all day? Why not just give up?

Studies by the NIH investigating links between unemployment depression and suicide have shown that after 3 years without work unemployed men were a little over twice as likely to commit suicide as their employed counterparts. While after nine years of unemployed “women were over three times more likely to kill themselves than their employed counterparts.” A 2015 study by Kim and von dem Knesebeck found that unemployment significantly increases the risk of depression and suicide.

Feeling economically irrelevant can also lead to a loss of self-worth. In The Managed Heart (1983), sociologist Arlie Hochschild argued 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. The flip side of learned helplessness is violent acting-out from flashes of rage at the injustice of your helplessness.

Harari's statement about pacifying the "useless class" with the distractions of games and drugs starts to seem dangerous as a solution, even if it was only intended as a provocation.

Virtual reality games and entertainment may provide temporary relief, but they are unlikely to address an underlying sense of purposelessness that comes from “killing time” with “nothing really to do”. Furthermore, virtual games, online games and hours spent on screens form addictive behaviours, even rewiring the brains of the young, as Jonathan Haidt has warned us. In fact, excessive reliance on such digital dopamine-reward addictions has been shown to 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.

Universal Basic Income - remedy or acceleration of Human Replacement?

One proposed solution to the technologically induced unemployment of the “useless class” is the institution of a system Universal Basic Income (UBI), a policy that provides all citizens with a regular, unconditional sum of money – a dole. Proponents argue that UBI would alleviate poverty, reduce precariousness and provide a safety net for those displaced by automation and AI. However, critics, including Harari himself, warn that UBI may entrap the class whose lack of purpose and motivation is only deepened by the overbearing sense of their total economic dependence and inferiority. Reliance on the state can undermine individual autonomy and initiative.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell, in “In Praise of Idleness” (1932), argued that leisure is a valuable human good. However, he also warned that without meaningful activities, leisure can lead to boredom and despair. Similarly, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), emphasises the importance of engaging in challenging and meaningful tasks for psychological well-being. UBI, while addressing material needs, does not provide the sense of purpose that comes from meaningful work, or the challenge that the flow state requires, when we are pushes to reach beyond our abilities, and we sense we are growing our skills.

A "useless class" sustained by UBI may feel like "paid parasites," contributing nothing to society and internalising a sense of worthlessness. This could only be exacerbated by being subjected to the constant Capitalist barrage of images we receive today through all our media, of the rich, the fashionable, the desirable and the successful leading energetic, international lives in the pursuit of their “dreams”. This humiliating contrast could lead to social unrest, as individuals trapped on UBI within the useless class seek to reclaim some sense of dignity through protest or rebellion, or it could lead to random acts of violence, against the affluent, against the technologists or even against the machines that have trapped people in static unemployment.

Remedies like UBI, whether paid for by the state or co-financed by big tech companies, while well-intentioned, fail to address the deeper need for purpose, dignity and connection, they may even lead to an entrenchment of a social subclass who are stuck in a state of permanent learned helplessness and futile rage.

There is also another option which is the creation of subsidised ‘busy-jobs’ to keep the useless class occupied. In “Bullshit Jobs” (2018), anthropologist David Graeber argued that many jobs within techno-capitalism are already inherently meaningless, yet they nonetheless provide an illusion of a sense of purpose.

But would being paid to stick square pegs in square holes for a living be more or less humiliating than UBI? As Graeber warns: “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist…. Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.”

Made-up jobs to keep people busy are not the answer. So, what is?

When thinking through these problems we tend to think of what is best for other people, the existing subclasses, we may even be a little condescending and managerial as we try to work out what is best for those unfortunates beneath us. But we fail to grasp that AI is coming for the white-collar workers and not so much the blue. This is because white-collar jobs often involve repetitive office tasks that can be easily automated by AI systems, while many blue-collar roles require manual labour or direct customer service elements that are harder to replicate with AI.

Think that through. You might be in the administrative middle class now but soon, if Harari is right, you might find yourself within the useless class. If that were to happen, how would you survive the learned helplessness that could engulf you?

The Tsunami & the Arc

It’s all too easy to adopt optimistic manager-speak and talk of the need for governments and corporations to prioritise meaningful job creation in sectors requiring human ingenuity and empathy, while accommodating AI’s growing workplace demands.

We could put on a politician’s smile and say, it’s not inevitable that AI and automation will damage jobs; they may create millions more. We could even claim AI is an opportunity for entrepreneurship and enhanced creativity, growing the economy (“exponentially,” as the gurus say), ensuring AI serves as a “tool” for empowerment rather than alienation. Blah blah blah, and so on. We’ve all heard these clichés before. We could end with the word-salad sophistry forced onto every Big Tech article, reprocessing press releases as news.

This ‘tech optimism’ was the jargon trotted out by the UK Government as it bowed to Big Tech pressure to sweep away copyright protections, overriding a months-long consultation thousands of artists participated in, if the submissions were even read.

Faced with this betrayal, many resort to the ‘ostrich’ manoeuvre: head in the sand. Negligent and irresponsible, it’s false hope that hiding will stop the tsunami, even as the waters recede and other birds flee.

Actually, this metaphor, is often used by tech gurus. Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum executive chair and frequent Harari host, likened the Fourth Industrial Revolution to a “tsunami of technological change.” Harari, though avoiding the tsunami image, called AI “a social weapon of mass destruction.”

Strangely, despite his pessimism, Harari is optimistic in response. In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, he says:

"What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster."

Harari, an accelerationist, argues that resisting progress is futile; we must adapt. Like Keynes, he trusts the technologies causing the problem to solve it. Does he think he can outrun the tsunami? Or escape on an AI-built boat?

Mapping this to preparedness, when you know the tsunami is coming you would be wise to use the time before the inundation to create back-up plans, locating types of work that will not be impacted, you may have to start a second career, you may have to downsize, retrain, to find an area of work that will not be taken over by AI. You may have to assume the worst and take Harari’s warning at face value. Don’t just build a lifeboat or run, get together with others who are ‘in the same boat’ and build an arc. You might be wise to start your prep now.

There is only one other option, and that is that you join the ranks of those who are doing the opposite of the accelerationists, by trying to decelerate and reign-in AI. Those who are demanding an end to the exploitative scraping of images, books, music and films, for so-called “AI training”, in violation of copyright laws, calling for regulations and new laws or reinforcements of existing laws to protect artists from theft by these plundering AI companies. Or those calling for eco-regulations to stop the rapid growth of data centres with their colossal and wasteful use of electricity.

As a decelerationist you can campaign for your governments and your unions to compensate people for the damaging effects of runaway AI venture capital growth. You can get together with other anti-AI activists and spread counter information about the power and promise of AI and try to discourage investment in it, you can try to burst the AI bubble, and push for an AI economy crash that might hold AI back for a few years. There are also more ‘disruptive’ ‘targeted’ ways to fight back directly against AI companies and their products.

But at the same you should know that you are just slowing down the tsunami, building small walls and dams and barricades together. AI is going to keep coming, not because Large Language Models are destined to reach Human-level-intelligence, AGI, the singularity and superintelligence, because they aren’t, but because AI has now entered the time when an international economic race to the bottom has begun, and every country is fearful of missing out or losing advantage so they deregulate faster than the others. An accelerating spiral, such races to the bottom are not periods of careful calculation, reason and caution.

This is not an either or, you can do both - prepare for surviving the tsunami by building up a secondary livelihood beyond the reach of AI, while at the same time working to try to hold back the flood.

The most important thing of all is to confront the worst. To do that it may help to picture yourself and your loved ones trapped in the “useless class”, stuck in one location, with UBI or close to zero earnings, with no hope of mobility and gradually succumbing to learned helplessness. Which is what might happen if you leave your preparations too late, or if you tell yourself, this will happen to other people, not to me, “my area of work is safe from human replacement by AI”.

In the bigger picture, no matter what you do personally to survive the tsunami, the most important thing to do is work together to build the walls and flood gates. And that for artists is the hardest thing of all, because it means we have to down our tools, leave our much-prized solitude and work towards a common goal.

Maybe we have to stop working on our novels and albums and artworks; stop living in the hope that we alone will survive against the odds while others drown. And lay down all the differences too that artists fought over in the last decade, all the identity politics and its enemies, all the virtue signalling and factional infighting, all the no-platforming. Lay all that aside and focus on the common threat from AI.

Better to stop our divisiveness now; to stop our actual work or content creation, and to go on strike and make the sacrifice of pulling together in a unified front. If we don’t make a stand, then human replacement by AI will decimate future generations of artists and culture creators.

Artists, musicians and writers actually hold more power than we realise, or realised - as without our stolen songs and pictures and words, Artificial Intelligence amounts to very little. Our stolen work has been what has made a word-prediction algorithm appear human, appear brilliant and full of talent and ideas. AI is nothing without our stolen art.

We were unaware of how our art was used to fuel the growth of the tsunami, and now it threatens to sweep us away. What is there to do now? Build your boat, help construct the arc, or prop up the floodgates. The choice is yours, but we must start now. We can’t wish this tsunami away.

References

Kposowa, AJ. (2001). Unemployment and suicide: a cohort analysis of social factors predicting suicide in the US National Longitudinal Mortality Study. Psychol Med. 2001;31(1):127–138.

Johoda, M. (2009). Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press.

Hochschild, A.R. (2012). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.

If you have found this and other articles of value, then the best way to support my Substack is to purchase a copy of my new novel. This is my 9th book - the anti-AI techno-thriller “For Emma” It is published by Leamington Books in the UK and from June 17th, by Arcade Publishing in the USA.