published last year by the researcher and former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, predicting that A.I. will reach or exceed human capacity in 2027. Aschenbrenner writes that it is “strikingly plausible” that, by then, “models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.” At that point, technological progress would become self-reinforcing, operating on a runaway feedback loop: A.I. would build more powerful A.I. on its own, rendering humans superfluous.
extremely online programmer who might work “nine-nine-six,” a term adopted from workers in China that refers to a schedule of 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., six days a week. The only way to escape the permanent A.I. underclass, ironically, is to lean in and hustle in a bot-like way.
The reward for the grind might be a role as an overlord of the A.I. future: the closer to collaborating with the machine you are, the more power you will have.
In Marx and Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto” formulation, A.I.’s underclass might eventually join the proletariat revolution. But that would require a collective recognition of the technology’s oppressive effects, and class consciousness could be hard to raise in an era when media feeds and information consumption are increasingly shaped by A.I. itself. Marx and Engels believed that the lumpenproletariat was especially vulnerable to political manipulation: the group’s grim conditions, he wrote, “prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
