San Francisco allows thousands of people with substance-abuse problems or mental-health issues to live on the streets. (TEUN VOETEN/PANOS PICTURES/REDUX)
No city better captures the contradictions of twenty-first-century America than San Francisco. The capital of the AI revolution is also a place where open drug use, mental illness, and public disorder have become banal features of daily life. Increasingly, the two realities seem to be bleeding into each other.
What explains the flurry of concern in San Francisco over the supposedly imminent creation of a “permanent underclass”? The phrase, prominent in tech circles on X, refers to the vast, impoverished caste that many fear AI automation could create as jobs disappear and wealth flows increasingly to owners of capital. Murmurs about the permanent underclass began as a kind of inside joke in San Francisco—a winking reference to the awe and anxiety sweeping the tech industry as AI models steadily improved and engineers realized that they would either embrace the new tools or get left behind. As one popular meme put it: “You have [blank] months to escape the permanent underclass” (where the blank is a stand-in for your “artificial general intelligence timeline”—or how long you think it will take the models to automate almost all work)…