Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass, Should You Be Worried Too? There's a joke going around Silicon Valley that stopped being funny about six months ago. It goes like this: if you're not aggressively adopting AI right now, not just using it, but building with it, shipping with it, becoming it, you're going to end up in the permanent underclass. Not "struggling a bit." Not "between jobs." Underclass. As in: left behind forever, watching from the outside while a tiny elite of capital-owners and AI-builders run the world without you. The thing about jokes that stop being funny? That's usually when they start being true. I live in San Francisco, the same San Francisco where, as one recent opinion piece put it, "most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it." Young researchers pull million-dollar salaries. Startup founders chase the next unicorn. And...