The AI Underclass & The New American Dream

There is a new idea spreading through Silicon Valley, the place where so much of our technology is created. This idea is that a new, permanent “underclass” of people is being created. These are the people who will be left behind as artificial intelligence, or AI, takes over more and more jobs.

But who is in this class? It’s a surprising answer. The people who might be in the most trouble are not the ones you’d expect. According to this new way of thinking, the group most at risk is the college-educated. That’s right. The people who have spent years in school and have expensive degrees might be the ones who get replaced first.

Why is this? The problem starts in college itself. For many years, colleges have been giving out more and more A’s. It used to be that a “C” grade was average. Now, it feels like almost everyone gets an A or a B. This is often called “grade inflation.” It means that a college degree doesn’t always mean what it used to. It’s harder to tell who really worked hard and learned a lot, and who just got by.

But the bigger problem is what students are actually learning. Many college graduates today have not read many full books. They might read summaries or chapters, but not entire texts. They also write very few long papers. And when they do write papers, it is very tempting to use AI to do the work.

You can type a rough idea into a program, and it will spit out a well-written, organized paper in seconds. It’s very hard for students to resist this. After all, the AI makes your writing sound much better.

Now, to be fair, you can’t just tell the AI to “write a paper” and get a good grade. You still need to do the research. You need to understand the topic. You need to have the raw facts and ideas to feed into the AI in the first place. The AI is a great tool for polishing a draft, but you have to provide the raw materials.

However, to do that research, you need to be “literate.” You need to know how to read and understand complex information. You need a basic understanding of math and statistics. You need to know the difference between things that are connected (correlation) and things that actually cause each other (causation).

If you don’t have this basic understanding, the AI won’t save you. It will just create more “slop”—meaningless, poorly argued nonsense. It will just produce a different kind of bad paper. For people who are functionally illiterate, meaning they can read words but can’t understand complex ideas, the AI is just a tool to create more confusion.

This creates a scary situation. College is incredibly expensive, and most students have to take out loans to pay for it. Here’s the worst part: most of that college debt can never be wiped away, even if you go bankrupt. If you start a business and it fails, you can declare bankruptcy and get rid of that business debt. But you can’t do that with student loans. This was a deliberate law passed a long time ago.

It was designed so that students couldn’t just graduate, get a great job, and then declare bankruptcy to erase their debt. Politicians sometimes talk about forgiving student loans, but the law makes it extremely difficult to do so on a large scale. This means that millions of people are stuck with huge monthly payments for decades. They are trapped.

So, the college-educated person has a degree that might not mean much; they might not have learned the deep skills needed to analyze information, and they are trapped under a mountain of debt. They are being squeezed from all sides. This is the group that might be most vulnerable to being replaced by AI.

The New American Dream: Working with Your Hands

Now, let’s look at who is not going to be in this AI underclass. The new hero of the economy is the blue-collar worker. These are the people who work with their hands. Think about a plumber. When your toilet is overflowing and water is spilling all over the floor, you don’t call a computer program. You call a plumber. A plumber has to come to your house, look at the pipes, figure out the problem, and fix it with their hands and their tools. AI can’t do that.

What about an electrician? When a storm knocks out the power in your neighborhood, AI can’t climb a pole and fix the wires. When you want to add a new outlet in your kitchen, you need someone who knows the building codes, can work safely with high voltage, and can run wires through your walls. That’s a skilled trade.

Carpenters are the same. They build houses, frames, cabinets, and decks. They use saws, hammers, and their knowledge of wood and design to create real, physical things. Dental hygienists are another great example. They are the people who clean your teeth at the dentist’s office. They use special tools to scrape plaque and polish your teeth. They have to interact with you, be gentle, and know exactly what they are doing in your mouth. Again, a robot or AI is a long way from being able to do that.

It even includes the person at the car wash who takes your keys, drives your car into the tunnel, and then wipes it down at the end. They vacuum the seats and scrub the floor mats. This job requires human hands, human judgment, and human interaction. An AI can’t look at your car and see that a spot was missed.

Why are all these jobs safe from AI? It comes down to two things: physical labor and human interaction.

First, these jobs require physical movement. You have to be there, in person, to do the work. You have to move around, lift things, and use your hands to build, fix, or clean. AI is information. It exists on a screen. It can’t install a new water heater or wire a new ceiling fan.

Second, these jobs are constantly changing. Every house is different. Every plumbing system is unique. Every patient has different teeth. A carpenter has to deal with wood that might be warped. A plumber has to figure out pipes that were installed incorrectly by the previous owner. This kind of “hands-on problem solving” requires a human brain. You need to look at the situation, figure out what’s wrong, and figure out the best way to fix it. This is a type of thinking that AI is very, very bad at.

The best part is that these jobs pay very well. A master plumber or electrician can make a fantastic living. They often make more money than college graduates who are sitting in an office. And they don’t have the same kind of debt. Instead of spending four years in college and $100,000 on tuition, they spent time in an apprenticeship. They learned on the job, they earned money while they learned, and they ended up with a highly valuable, lifelong skill.

This is the new American Dream. It’s a dream where you build a stable, middle-class life not with a fancy piece of paper from a university, but with a strong back, a smart mind, and a good set of tools. It’s a life where your value comes from being able to solve real-world problems for real people. And in a world where computers are getting smarter and smarter, the people who can do things that computers can’t will always be in demand.

The Future is Skilled

In the end, the AI revolution is not just about robots. It’s about the value we place on different kinds of intelligence. For a long time, we told our kids, “Go to college, or you’ll end up working with your hands.” We made it seem like a trade school was a second choice.

But the joke is on us. It might be that the people we are encouraging to go to college and get into debt are the ones who will be left behind. The future belongs to the tinkerers, the fixers, and the builders. The future belongs to the people who can not only think with their heads but also work with their hands.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.