A rationalist blog forum popular in the Bay Area, _LessWrong_ is known for its sprawling, hyper-logical takes on everything from AI research to optimal reproductive strategies. But during the 2025 holiday season, a version of a post beginning with three concise and concerning sentences appeared on the site in dramatic fashion: “I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, lots of jobs will be gone soon.
Probably, the smartest thing alive will no longer be human.” Those who kept reading only encountered more of the writer’s malaise: “Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. … I stop going to lecture; I can no longer justify the time, and no one notices in a 300 person class anyway. I spend most of my time in the research building instead. … If there are a few years left, I want to spend them fully, and this is what carries me through most days.” > A few weeks later, he advised his followers: ‘you have 2 years to create a podcast in order to escape the permanent underclass.’ The post was written by Parv Mahajan, a 20-year-old computer science undergrad at Georgia Tech. His piece is among a growing number of works explaining that AI could create a “permanent underclass,” a subcategory of (sub)humans that may very likely include you and me and everybody else we know if we do not entrench ourselves against the impending AI superintelligence, which could very well reduce the worth of all human labor to zero.
I was told that this narrative was catching on. This spring, I traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area to find out why young, bright minds like Mahajan were suddenly so pessimistic about the future — and how that anxiety was shaping the decisions that will determine the course of the rest of their lives. My search for answers brought me initially to the studio apartment of 28-year-old Jayden Clark.
While he didn’t quite invent the permanent underclass idea, if you’ve heard of it, he’s likely the reason. We should laugh a bit more, because we’re ridiculous over here. We do some strange, strange shit.” Clark has made a living out of exposing exactly how strange that shit really is.
A former startup founder, he recently abandoned his C-suite role to become a tech-industry influencer, producing snackable social media content for those yearning to know how the sausage of Silicon Valley is really made. That content includes Swole as a Service, a YouTube channel where prominent AI researchers answer questions about the latest tech trends while lifting weights with Clark, as well as sarcastic, jargon-laden posts blasted daily to his more than 40,000 X followers, a group that includes prominent employees of major AI labs and VC firms. Clark moved to San Francisco from Australia in 2017, not as an aspiring denizen of Silicon Valley but to study the saxophone at the city’s music conservatory.
Once he arrived, he found himself impressed less by the city’s art scene and more by the promise of its tech culture. He eventually swapped his saxophone for a computer keyboard and quickly built his first startup, a software company for mom-and-pop rental shops. It was around this time that Clark began sharing his most risqué opinions about the tech industry from an anonymous Twitter account.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
