Frozen in Place
AI-Accelerated Racial Caste?
Happy Met Gala Monday — or as it's been unofficially rebranded, the "Tech Gala," a name that captures how the event has drifted from fashion spectacle to tacky flex for the planet's wealthiest.
I wanted to share some excerpts that stuck with me after reading Jasmine Sun New York Times article Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass, published April 30th.
But first, a some personal context.
My parents settled our family in the San Francisco Bay Area after a chapter in Los Angeles, where I was born, and Cincinnati, Ohio, where my younger brother was born. It was the late 90s during explosive startup tech for foundational companies - Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Google in our backyard. I used my PC to type my homework, create vector art, and most importantly, to take care of my rainbow colored virtual pets and explore Neopia on neopets.com.
I was computer literate and enjoyed exploring the internet, but I wasn’t really interested in tech as a career. I understand why now: I'm a systems thinker, more interested in the human and structural consequences of technology than in building inside the industry. And my frustration with the 2000s and 2010s tech boom is that it’s leaders built fast and without accounting for the lived experiences of people across different identities and social positions.
In my lifetime, entire global relationships, industries, government, and human behavior have been reshaped by tech. Few people seemed to anticipate the depth of disfunction that would follow. Even if AI disappeared tomorrow, we’d be sitting with the compounding damage of several rounds of unchecked innovation.
We are at the precipice of another dramatic reordering of our society. Except this time the pace is accelerated and impact, if unchecked, will cut deeper.
Here are some quotes that stood out to me from Sun’s piece:
The future of work will be really, really different
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, spent much of the past year on a nonstop media circuit predicting that 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs may disappear by 2030.
Then comes the Permanent Underclass
Some even believe that artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will create a permanent underclass. In the United States, the term “underclass” gained currency in the 1960s to describe the factory workers left behind by the postwar automation boom. Today, it has become repopularized as a viral term for a theory that posits that people have a limited window of time to build wealth before A.I. and robotics are advanced enough to fully replace human labor. At that point, we will get frozen in our current class positions: The rich will be able to deploy superintelligent machines to do their bidding, and everyone else will be rendered useless and unemployable, left to live off welfare scraps.
A social underclass is a public policy choice
…the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.
Some economic policy experts predict that A.I. will look like an accelerated and expanded version of deindustrialization. But rather than companies outsourcing jobs to overseas workers, they will be outsourcing them to A.I. agents.
Eugenics discourse re-emerges, with social worth tied to cognitive performance relative to AI
But his [Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic] longer-term concerns are about deeper matters than job losses. In a roughly 20,000-word essay about A.I. risks posted to his personal blog in January, he warned that A.I. may create “an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass’” for people with “lower intellectual ability.” That group would grow to encompass more of the population as A.I.’s capabilities allow it to outpace more humans.
The entire system will need to change, which will require cross-sector collaboration and alignment
Education, health care and tax systems will require an overhaul if white-collar employment is no longer a reliable path to middle-class stability.
Without regulation, AI could be a zero sum game that blows up for everyone
In March, the Palantir chief executive, Alex Karp, spoke on a panel with the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien. “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest,” Mr. Karp said. “If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”
I’ve been thinking about AI as something that will further entrench an already deeply racialized hierarchy. The top tier: AI researchers and start-up founders earning million dollar salaries, racing to build the next big thing, and likely insulated from the consequences of what they are building. The bottom economic tiers: working class Black, Brown, and Indigenous people who were already excluded from high-paying jobs in the 2000s tech booms, not because of lack of skill or ability, but inequitable educational pipelines, hiring practices, and structural barriers that compounded over decades. AI doesn’t create this hierarchy. It accellerates and potentially locks it in. A reality of a Permanent Underclass where myths of meritocracy no longer fool anyone.
AI-Accelerated Racial Caste
Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Lies that Divide Us, defines caste as “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” A caste system uses rigid and arbitrary boundaries that keep people in their assigned places, regardless of merit or effort. Wilkerson argues the racist capitalist system we are in is closer to a Racial Caste system, where race functions not just as prejudice but as infrastructure — a fixed system of assignment that determines who gets access, who gets locked out, and who gets left behind.
The dynamics we're watching meet several of Wilkerson's Eight Pillars of Caste. The most obvious is Occupational Hierarchy, the reservation of the more desirable occupations for the dominant castes. Unchecked AI acceleration is a direct accelerant of that pillar.
The pillar that strikes me most is Divine will: the belief that social stratification is beyond human control, ordained by a force greater than us. The assertion underclass as inevitable for people with "lower intellectual ability” is a secular version of divine will. the impacts of AI rendered as natural law, not political choice.
It doesn't have to be that way. A social underclass is a policy choice. China — cast as the villain in the international order — just ruled that AI adoption cannot justify firing workers, modeling the kind of intervention that's actually possible. But given how deeply racialized stratification is already baked into American society, policy alone may be necessary but not sufficient. We may need something more fundamental than legislation. We need to name what this actually is. Thoughts?