Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, in his books (Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century), has made one of the most chilling predictions of our time. He treats it lightly. Humans may be just a temporary medium for transmitting intelligence.
“The most important question of the 21st century may be what to do with all the superfluous people.”
Harari does not claim that people will disappear. He claims that they will lose their economic and military value. Medieval rulers and Adolf Hitler needed people. People were fundamental. Not just the elite: they needed the whole mass. The more, the better. In the future, people may be nothing more than votes, if democratic systems survive. The vast majority of people would be useless, both militarily and economically.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology, machines are, for the first time in history, threatening not only our physical abilities (as during the Industrial Revolution) but also our cognitive ones. At present, they threaten the cognitive ones far more than the physical ones. Economic forecasts say that advanced AI will replace up to 75% of white-collar workers.
If an algorithm can diagnose cancer, drive a car, write code or compose music better than we can, Harari argues that a huge class of people will emerge who will not just be unemployed but unemployable.
This vision is unsettling, but it is not the only possible scenario. What do the data and other leading thinkers say about this problem?
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What do the latest data say?
A look at the hard data shows that the transformation of the labour market is already under way, but so far there is no apocalypse. The data point to a massive shift rather than the absolute end of work:
- Goldman Sachs (2023): The bank’s report estimates that generative artificial intelligence could automate up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. At the same time, it adds that, historically, this has led to the creation of entirely new professions and a huge leap in productivity.
- World Economic Forum (WEF – Future of Jobs Report 2023): It expects that by 2027, 83 million jobs will disappear but 69 million new ones will be created. That is a net loss of 14 million jobs.
- Changing demand: According to the WEF, demand is rising dramatically for AI specialists and data analysts, but also for professions that require empathy and human contact (elderly care, psychology, education), where machines are hardest to substitute.
From a slightly different angle
Harari’s vision is a warning, but many economists, sociologists and philosophers offer different, often more optimistic or more radical perspectives.
1. The end of drudgery and Utopia for Realists (Rutger Bregman)
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sees automation as a huge opportunity. If machines do most of the work, why should we see that as a threat?
In his book Utopia for Realists, he proposes introducing a universal basic income (UBI). Bregman argues that the problem is not that people would be “superfluous”, but that our society makes the right to a dignified life conditional on paid work. If a basic income were guaranteed, people could devote their time to art, innovation, community or raising children, activities that the market today often does not reward financially.
2. The “lump of labour” fallacy (David Autor and Erik Brynjolfsson)
Economists from MIT warn against the so-called lump of labour fallacy. In their view, Harari somewhat forgets that the economy is not a cake that gets eaten until nothing is left.
- David Autor points out that while technology destroys tasks, it rarely destroys entire occupations. People will become managers of machines. AI will not replace doctors, but doctors with AI will replace doctors without AI.
- Erik Brynjolfsson stresses that human desires are endless. Once machines meet our basic needs more cheaply, we will discover new services and products that we cannot even name today (just as a 19th-century farmer could not have imagined the job of “social media manager”).
3. The “Bullshit Jobs” phenomenon (David Graeber)
The late American anthropologist David Graeber came up with a radical idea: a large share of today’s jobs are already “pointless”. In his book Bullshit Jobs, he argues that millions of people (in administration, corporate law, telemarketing) already secretly feel that if their job disappeared, the world would not notice at all.
Graeber’s view changes Harari’s question: perhaps we should not be afraid of losing our jobs. Perhaps the real challenge is to find meaning in life somewhere other than in pointless work created just so that we have something to do.
4. The rise of the care economy (Kai-Fu Lee)
Former head of Google China and AI expert Kai-Fu Lee agrees in his book AI Superpowers that AI will take over routine cognitive tasks. However, he sees the future of humanity in empathy and love. While AI can analyse data, it cannot hold a patient’s hand and give them hope. He believes we should massively shift funding into caring professions, education and healthcare.
An employment crisis, or a crisis of meaning?
Harari’s question “what to do with superfluous people” is rooted in a 20th-century paradigm that says: A person’s value = their economic productivity.
If machines take over productivity, we as a society must rethink the equation. It is not necessarily a dystopian story in which masses of people starve on the margins of society (although the distribution of wealth will be a key political issue). It could be a story about how humanity finally frees itself from having to work to survive and starts asking what the true meaning of human existence is. Perhaps the question for the 21st century is not “What will we do with useless people?” but rather “Who do we want to be when we no longer have to just work?”
