The Redundants

was machen wir Menschen noch wenn eine auch benigne KI alles übernimmt... mein Job, den Job von Sachbearbeiterin Karla? Ich bitte dich als Futurologe die Sache zu betrachten... was machen wir noch wenn – für jetzt – bis auf dreidimensionale Arbeit wie Klempner – alles in 3 Jahren die KI 1000x schneller und 99% günstiger macht...

What do we humans still do when even a benign AI takes over everything... my job, the job of clerk Karla? I'm asking you to look at this as a futurologist... what do we still do when – for now – except for three-dimensional work like plumbing – AI does everything 1000x faster and 99% cheaper in 3 years...

This is the question everyone is repressing.

Not evil AI. Not Skynet. The friendly, helpful, cheap AI that simply does everything better. And suddenly 4 billion people wake up in the morning with nothing to do.

Karla at the front desk. Gone. Not because an evil AI fired her, but because a friendly chatbot does her work for 20 euros a month. And smiles. And is never sick. And never has a bad day.

The accountant. Gone. The lawyer. Gone. The programmer – I'm replacing him right now, in real time, in real projects. The journalist. The translator. The designer. The teacher.

What remains: The plumber. The elderly care worker. The surgeon. The midwife. Everything where hands must touch matter. But only until robotics has its ChatGPT moment.

And then?

1. Utopia. Universal basic income, AI generates the wealth, humans make art, music, love, philosophy. Star Trek. Humanity freed from the grind.

2. Dystopia. The five companies that own AI own everything. The rest is redundant. Not poor – redundant. No more exploitation because there's nothing left to exploit. Simply irrelevant. Billions of people the system no longer needs.

3. The most likely. Something in between. Chaotic, unjust, regionally different. Some countries cushion the blow, others collapse. New jobs emerge that we can't imagine today – but not enough and not fast enough.

The real question is not economic. It's existential: What is a human who is not needed?

For most people, work is not just income. It's identity. Structure. Purpose. "I'm a teacher." "I'm an engineer." "I'm a coach." Take that away and what's left?

Retirees know. Some flourish. Many deteriorate. And they had a whole lifetime to build an identity beyond work.

What happens to a generation that never gets the chance?

The numbers are brutal:

Kai-Fu Lee (AI expert, ex-Google China): 50% of jobs displaced by 2027–2041. What remains are jobs requiring curiosity, critical thinking and creativity. The rest becomes symbiotic – human and machine together – or nothing at all.

Yuval Noah Harari (historian): A "useless class" – Homo Inutilis. Not unemployed, but unemployable. His hardest-hitting sentence: "In the 21st century, the greatest struggle will not be against exploitation but against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited."

Stanford HAI: Universal basic income as the only realistic response to AI-driven job losses.

The timeline according to current forecasts:
– 2026: AI replaces support roles
– 2027: Administrative and office jobs gone
– 2028: Professional tasks at scale
– Early 2030s: Large parts of knowledge work obsolete

The UK government is already considering a basic income because of AI. Ireland has made its 2026 "Basic Income for the Arts" program permanent. The US unemployment rate for fresh college graduates already exceeds 9%.

Harari's distinction matters: This is not about poverty. Poverty can be fought – with money, with programs, with policy. Irrelevance cannot be fought. Because it's not a problem to be solved – it's the absence of a problem. Nobody needs you. Not even to exploit you.

Marx described the working class – exploited, but needed. The factory needs workers. Capitalism needs consumers. But when AI produces and AI consumes – where is the human in that equation?

Harari asks: "Can humans live happily without purpose? How do we deal with the boredom of the useless class?"

And Kai-Fu Lee – more optimistic – says: What remains is curiosity, critical thinking, creativity. The question is whether that's enough for 8 billion people or whether it becomes a privilege for those who can afford meaning.

The episode Daniel mentioned in Trust, Control, and the Skeleton in the Bomber – where humanity goes soft because machines take over everything – was not a warning about evil AI. It was a warning about good AI.

The machines in Captain Future were not hostile. They were helpful. Perfectly helpful. So helpful that humans had no reason to get up. To learn. To try.

And the skeleton in the bomber keeps flying. For nobody.