Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
Major op-ed investigation by Jasmine Sun (NYT Opinion, April 30, 2026) on the *San Francisco consensus*: fear of the *permanent underclass* — a viral theory holding that AI could freeze economic mobility and create a class rendered useless by automation. The article documents the internal dissonance within the labs (Amodei on "white-collar blood bath" and 50% of junior white-collar jobs disappearing by 2030; Altman 2021 → Lehane silence → *Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age* white paper, April 2026; Anthropic Institute, March 2026, led by Jack Clark), the benchmarks steering R&D toward human replacement (A.I. Productivity Index, OpenAI's GDPVal: *"over 80% win rate compared to human professionals"* within a few months), corporate actions (Block/Dorsey -50% headcount with Opus 4.6 + Codex 5.3, Anthropic ARR $30B versus $9B at end of 2025), and the Shor political strategy (79% of voters worried, jobs guarantee > UBI, *"They work for the bots. We work for you."*). Reference item in the *AI labor 2026* dossier.
Jasmine Sun (Ms. Sun écrit sur l'IA et la culture Silicon Valley sur Substack)