The Useless Class: Is Yuval Noah Harari’s Theory a Certainty?
In Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling work Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), he argues capitalism risks creating a “useless class” of people:
“The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?
This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.”
The press picked up on it the concept. Here’s a Guardian feature in May 2016, by science editor Ian Sample, in AI will create ‘useless’ class of human:
“Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution.
Harari calls it ‘the rise of the useless class’ and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition.”
We’re not there yet by a long shot, but at the tail end of 2026 it’s never felt closer. Trump’s disgusting war has fuelled business uncertainty and mass layoffs (particularly in America), with AI ready and waiting to automate many mundane tasks. AI is also blocking recent graduates, and other young people, from getting many entry-level jobs.
There’s now a well-documented employment crisis in Europe and North America (again, particularly in the US), with swathes of professionals still in work “quiet quitting” due to apathy over their employers’ obnoxious behaviour.
For people who studied fancy degrees such as chemical engineering, law, web development, business management, or physics, was there any point? Will there be any work? Yes, when the job market improves in the future (i.e. when the war ends). But the job market has fundamentally changed, some degrees may well be wasted, and artificial intelligence is the big concern.
The job market has long faced short-term macro shocks such as wars and recessions, then recovers slightly. AI-driven automation is secular and permanent. Will there be any career unaffected by AI?
I’ve consistently seen older Conservatives chastising Gen Z for pursuing such fancy degrees when they could have pursued, for example, work in the trades. This is an obnoxious, gobby stance to take, as if trades are suddenly inundated with 10+ million people looking for a new line of work, those industries become massively oversaturated with professionals and work shrivels up.
For example, imagine a hyper-competitive plumbing sector here in Manchester, UK. Delight in, say, 50,000 newly qualified plumbers aggressively vying for even the most mundane call out fee, battling it out to unclog toilets to pay the bills.
The sign of a healthy economic system is one with:
- Many jobs across many industries
- Many secure jobs across many industries
- A well-paid workforce able to meet basic existence needs
Capitalism hasn’t delivered much of that since the 2008 recession. All we’ve seen in the western world is skyrocketing poverty and wealth inequality, fuelling immense social instability and political disturbances.
Couple this with the unchecked population explosion of the last 50 years, now with 8+ billion people on the planet, and I’d like to see governments taking action to prepare for this. The problem is we live in a socioeconomic structure built around worshipping rich people and viewing greed as a tremendous personality trait. We’re so far entrenched into capitalism that governments make a beeline to keep business owners happy; citizens are secondary.
We nod to one of our favourite social commentators (According to Nicole) below. She highlights how many rich people have used their wealth to unfairly gain an advantage across society. As the billionaire class, in particular, is a massive problem. The “job makers” (as the myth goes) could well be on track to create an unprecedented employment crisis.
As it stands in the UK, as of November 2026, the employment rate for people aged between 16-64 is 75.3% (Office for National Statistics stats). 34.577 million people are in work, with 1.712 million unemployed. With the economic struggles from Trump’s war, job vacancies have fallen to around 691,000 (this is where the job market crisis hits, with 1.712 million crunching into under 700,000 jobs).
For professionals in work, some may feel smug and secure on large wage packages and a long-term role with an employer. They may look at the recent Canva and Netflix lay offs and think it won’t happen to them. But those redundancies/lay offs could come for them at any second. Bosses don’t care, if it means saving a bit of overhead for their pay rise and bonus they’ll do it.
I think of a social media example a few years ago, where a business owner pocketed a $3 million bonus and threw a $100 pizza party for the employees who had made him that money. No salary reviews, no bonuses for staff, just some cheese and veg on bread. I never do understand this stuff. Why not take a $2.9 million bonus and with that $100,000 give the staff who’ve made you rich a little extra something for their efforts? No? Yes, as that’s not how mindless individualism works.
Thinking ahead, which the world’s governments clearly aren’t, if Yuval Noah Harari’s theory comes to pass there’ll have to be some form of universal credit for the useless class. Given how relentless the housing and cost of living crises are, UC would have to be quite a lot to meet everyone’s basic needs.
The super-superrich would easily be able to fund all of it, of course, but greed doesn’t leave much room for empathy. Billionaires just don’t function on any level other than total self-absorption. In all their glorious supremacy, why should they lose 1% of their trillionaire fortune to support the people who didn’t work hard enough?
Conjecture and theorising on my part, but it’s an individualistic economic system and one where concerns for others is rarely evident (and viewed as “communism” when present).
As with the climate change crisis, complete blame for the useless class issue would fall on capitalism. We can see this crisis coming from 1,000 miles away, but the big blockers are:
- UNLIMITED GROWTH
- PROFIT MARGINS
- SUPERYACHTS
- INVESTMENT PORTFOLIOS
- CRONYISM
- EGOMANIA
- UNDIAGNOSED PSYCHOPATHY/SOCIOPATHY/NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER
And a sizeable chunk of the western population has the temporarily embarrassed millionaire mindset. They think their hard work will result in money, as that’s what we’ve had drummed into us since a young age. Oh well. For younger generations, get that masters degree in unclogging toilets and get ready for a plumbing gig economy where 1,000 people clamour for work per clog. That’s market efficiency for you in the big beautiful business world.
Addendum Alert: AI’s Impact on the Environment
A final kicker with all this fake AI business urgency is the colossal impact the technology has through:
- Carbon emissions
- Enormous water consumption
- Land use
- Electronic waste
The physical infrastructure required to maintain all these AI data centres is immense and drains a huge amount of natural resources. See the UN’s June 2026 piece AI’s environmental costs threaten water, land, and climate:
“Data centres, the global infrastructure powering AI, could consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2030 – nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, countries collectively home to more than 650 million people.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. On top of the carbon footprint, every unit of electricity used by data centres also carries a “water footprint” for cooling and energy production, and a “land footprint” associated with power generation and supply chains …
Public debate has largely centred on the energy required to train advanced AI models, but the study finds that day-to-day usage accounts for roughly 80 to 90 per cent of total energy demand.
The scale is striking: one widely used AI service is estimated to process around 2.5 billion prompts per day, consuming hundreds of gigawatt-hours of electricity each year.
Energy use also varies widely depending on the task. Generating a single AI image can require more than a thousand times the energy of simple text classification, while video generation demands even greater resources.
Efficiency improvements alone are unlikely to offset these rising demands. The report points to the so-called rebound effect, in which lower costs and improved performance drive higher usage, ultimately increasing total resource consumption.”
Tech companies can’t keep up with the massive power demands. This has led to previously retired coal plants having their lifespans dragged out, with some corporations even building on-site gas/methane plants to meet business and public demand.
At the moment, the data centres lead to 180 million tonnes of CO₂ each year (enough to rank as the 11th most wasteful nation in the world, if viewed as a country). That’s going to go up a lot over the next five years.
The good news in all of this? Your least favourite junk food joint down the road can print off some AI fliers with vomit-inducing effects. Hurray for market efficiency.
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