Predictions about how many jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate have already become part of everyday life. Hardly a day passes without some new claim about who will no longer be needed. I will not weigh in on whether these concerns are realistic or exaggerated. There are arguments on both sides.
If the effects of AI do prove as dramatic as some suggest, the consequences will not be merely social and economic. They will also have a profound impact on class structure and on relations between classes.
When we look back at the labor movements of earlier eras, we tend to see only hard work, poverty, and injustice—or perceived injustice. Yet what mattered far more at the time was that workers were purposeful, relatively educated, disciplined, and capable of organizing themselves. There were enough such individuals among them to form a powerful social class, able to use its numerical strength to exert sustained pressure on the ruling groups.
This is not to disparage today’s drivers or retail workers—many of them are admirable people—but they are not in a position to act as equal opponents to those at the top. When lawyers or other professionals stand on the other side, they tend to view such workers less as peers and more as subjects easily shaped and directed. If the ranks of the disadvantaged included a substantial share of those who are now lawyers, doctors, programmers, or middle managers, the contest would look entirely different.
In a certain sense, one can discern the outlines of a return to the class conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And it is worth remembering that such conflicts are never confined to wages or labor laws alone. They permeate the whole of society and shape its character, influencing language, art, fashion, customs, and ways of life. Such tensions can tear a society apart, but they can also hasten and facilitate necessary change.
As always, the greatest social transformations are neither prepared nor planned. They simply happen.