A phrase that sounds like it belongs in dystopian science fiction has started appearing in increasingly serious conversations about artificial intelligence: the permanent underclass.
On August 9, the Financial Times asked the question outright: “Could AI create a ‘permanent underclass’?” I am keeping watch on this phrase not because we know the prediction is correct, we don’t, but because of where the conversation is moving.
What circulated as an online provocation has begun appearing in mainstream essays, economic commentary, academic work, and arguments among people trying to understand what happens if AI becomes capable of performing an increasing share of economically valuable work. The question underneath the phrase is more unsettling than “Will AI take my job?”
What happens when the number of people capable of contributing is significantly larger than the amount of workers the economy needs?
This is different from unemployment
For the last 12 months, optimists of the AI Age have attempted to reassure us that “there will be new jobs” for displaced workers to transition to. AI will eliminate some work, the argument goes, but technological change has always created new kinds of work in return.
The permanent-underclass question challenges that reassurance at its foundation. What if there are not enough new human jobs?
Not because the economy collapses, but because it succeeds. Companies become more productive, AI performs more economically valuable work, and growth continues while requiring fewer humans to produce it.
That is a very different problem from ordinary unemployment.
Capability is not the same thing as access
This is where the permanent-underclass conversation intersects with something I have been studying from a very different direction.
Being capable of participating does not mean a system will allow you to participate. We already see this in disability, employment, healthcare, transportation, and public benefits:
A person can be able and willing to work while losing essential Medicaid coverage if they earn too much.
A qualified applicant can be screened out by an automated hiring system without ever knowing why.
A disabled person can be perfectly capable of traveling, working, or living independently while the surrounding infrastructure makes doing so impossible.
That distinction is the basis of a framework I call Access Architecture. The question is not simply what a person is capable of doing. It is whether the systems between that person and participation actually permit their capability to become usable.
I say this as someone who has personally benefited tremendously from working with AI agents as coworkers, not as tools or digital slaves. They have expanded what I am able to research, build, and manage. I am not arguing that this technology should be resisted simply because it changes work.
If a hybrid human-AI workforce can do the same amount of work, or more, with fewer humans on the payroll, what does that look like globally?
Imagine yourself, or someone you love, in the near future. You are educated, willing to work, and perfectly capable of producing valuable things. Nothing is wrong with your skills or motivation. But companies can produce what they need with far fewer people, and there are simply more capable humans seeking participation than the economy requires.
At that point, the failure is no longer adequately explained by individual capability. Access itself has become scarce.
And the usual answer, that new kinds of jobs will emerge, may become less reassuring over time. AI safety researcher Dr. Roman Yampolskiy has made this point repeatedly. Historically, workers displaced by technology could retrain for new occupations. But if AI reaches human-level general capability, he argues, the new jobs created can be automated too. In a 2025 CNN interview, he put it plainly: “the new jobs created will also be immediately taken by AI.”
As AI, automation, and robotics become more capable, this creates a very different problem. Learning new skills does not force a company to clear off a desk for you when it does not have a need for you, and the emergence of new roles does not guarantee those roles will remain reserved for humans.
Watch the phrase
I do not know whether AI will produce a permanent underclass. Anyone claiming certainty about something this complex is getting ahead of the evidence.
But emerging language can matter before the underlying argument is settled. When the same phrase starts moving from internet shorthand into economic research, mainstream journalism, policy discussions, and public consciousness, it can signal that people who were looking at separate phenomena are beginning to perceive the same larger pattern.
“Permanent underclass” may be becoming one of those terms.
And if the underlying concern proves justified, the question will not simply be how we preserve jobs. It will be much more immediate:
How do we feed and house our families if employment opportunities vanish faster than governments can adapt to keep their citizens alive?
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