Yuval Noah Harari lays out a sobering scenario in The Atlantic in which vast swaths of humanity are relegated to a “useless class,” and in which AI and machine learning permit new and extremely powerful authoritarian social structures:
Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential.
