The Dispensable Human

A brilliant and important reckoning with the seismic shocks on our economy, our politics, and our society from the collapse of skilled work at a scale that has no historical precedent

We have never been here before. Analogies to industrialization, or electrification, or the internet, are fine and well, but never have so many different forms of knowledge work been threatened at the same time at such scale. Once upon a time, the relative scarcity of the very forms of highly skilled labor that artificial general intelligence now most threatens created the heart of the middle class as we know it, with its embedded structures of belonging. Without our professional identities, many of us literally wouldn’t know who we are, to say nothing of more basic questions of security.

Yascha Mounk, one of the world’s most celebrated political scientists, has made a close study for two decades of the impact of the hollowing out of the middle class globally on the rise of populism and oligarchy. He is thus perfectly positioned to understand the sweeping implications of AI. If the forces accelerating income inequality before AI amounted to a Category 1 hurricane, now the storm is Category 3 or 4, and we’re quickly headed to Category 5.

Mounk begins by making vivid how profound the impact of AI on so-called professional class work is, and to the world of labor as a whole. He takes us to the front lines of institutional transformation, and the cutting of edge of robotics. While there’s a range to the possible pace of the change ahead, even at minimum, he shows, we face a revolutionary impact.

Having grounded the reader in this reality, Mounk widens the aperture to take in its broader consequences. With his customary depth of field, he brings into focus how hard won the political freedoms that we take for granted have in fact been. It was the need to co-opt a rising middle class that impelled elites to share their power. When the middle class is weakened, democracy is weakened. And crucially, AI is further weakening the substrate that supports liberty by eroding confidence in a shared truth and stoking cynicism, and, even worse, giving despots unprecedented tools for surveillance and social control. And, cruelly, just as entry into the highest status professional vocations has become a paramount source of identity and community, the path to that charmed circle is narrowing radically. The result will be many more frustrated aspirants and a potential wholesale collapse in civilizational morale.

This dire vision is not inevitable, Mounk argues. He offers a clear-eyed set of prescriptions to avoid the worse-case outcomes. They all will require hard choices, and considerable collective will; nothing about this is going to be easy. But whatever your perspective on the politics, this book makes an irrefutable case that denial is not a very clever option.