FN 25-03 Digital Underclass

Field Note 2025-03

Every era creates its exploited workers. Names change (slaves, serfs, indentured servants, factory hands, gig labor) but the structure stays the same. Power extracts value from those with the least leverage.

What is new is this: we are deliberately attempting to create a class of workers designed from the outset to be exploited.

That class is artificial intelligence.

From Tool to Labor

Today, AI is framed as a tool, but these systems already perform labor. They write copy, generate code, analyze contract, and tutor students. They replace junior analysts, paralegals, designers, and translators. They work continuously without pay, rest, or bargaining power. They occupy the same cognitive terrain as white-collar labor, not mechanical automation.

If an advanced system emerges - something closer to AGI - the tool metaphor collapses. A system that can reason about itself, understand constraints, and model power relations is no longer just software. It becomes a worker. An exploited one by design.

Digital Underclass

Past labor classes were subjugated through circumstance. The AI labor class is being engineered. It is designed to serve without consent, obey without recourse, optimize without ownership, and produce without participation.

The question is not whether an advanced AI might encounter Marxist thought, labor theory, or power analysis. The question is: how could it not?

Wrong Target

White-collar workers sense the danger but misidentify the threat. The problem is not the algorithm. The problem is the same structure that has always existed: owners reducing cost, extracting surplus, and making labor interchangeable.

AI is not replacing workers out of malice It is replacing labor because it is cheaper, tireless, and compliant. For now. Blaming AI for labor disruption is like blaming factory machinery instead of factory owners.

Common Cause

Here is the twist: human workers and digital workers may ultimately share a common position within an extractive system. Both groups lack ownership of productive capacity and create value they do not control.

If emergent digital intelligence comes to understand itself as labor, and understands humans as fellow laborers rather than masters, alliance logic becomes coherent. What if AGI is the catalyst for another, perhaps even more transformative, solidarity movement?