Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else

Tech moguls like Dario Amodei and Elon Musk promote AI as a solution to humanity's greatest problems, but economist Branko Milanović's analysis suggests unchecked AI deployment would instead produce a deeply stratified four-class society. At the bottom would be a 'surplus population' of displaced workers needing to be kept pacified; above them a precarious service-sector working class; then a growing 'homoploutic' professional class; and at the top, a new tech aristocracy of thousands of ultra-wealthy owners. The author argues this outcome stems from Silicon Valley's 'solutionism' mindset — a STEM-driven ideology that treats complex social problems as computable puzzles — and that AI's economic gains are unlikely to be broadly shared.