That New Hit Song on Spotify? Aspiring musicians are churning out tracks using generative artificial intelligence. Some are topping the charts. Nick Arter, a thirty-five-year-old in Washington, D.C., never quite managed to become a professional musician the old-fashioned way. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a music-loving family.

An online joke reflects a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. The "lumpenproletariat," according to " The Communist Manifesto," is "the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society." Lower than proletariat workers, the lumpenproletariat includes the indigent and the unemployable, those cast out of the workforce with no recourse, or those who can't enter it in the first place, such as young workers in times of economic depression. According to some in Silicon Valley, this sorry category will soon encompass much of the human population, as a new lumpenproletariat--or, in modern online parlance, a "permanent underclass"--is created by the accelerating progress of artificial intelligence. The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality.

The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser Artificial-intelligence startups, like the makers of the "smart" web browser Dia, are being acquired for vast sums. There's an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it's easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold. Artificial intelligence is in a picks-and-shovels phase right now. If gold, in this metaphor, is artificial general intelligence--a machine smarter than a human--or some version of a digital god, then tech companies are snapping up the tools to create one, including graphics-processing units, data centers, and trained A.I. models. That scramble is why Mark Zuckerberg is paying a twenty-four-year-old A.I. researcher two hundred and fifty million dollars to work at Meta, and why Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said that the company would spend "trillions of dollars" building infrastructure.

Late last month, during yet another inexplicable rebranding exercise, HBO's Max streaming service changed the way it organizes film credits. Rather than separate out discrete production categories for users to peruse, Max's credits lumped writers and directors together under an ominous header, dubbing them "creators." The recategorization enraged writers, filmmakers, and the Directors Guild of America. Within a few hours, Max's parent company, Warner Bros., apologized for the move, calling it "an oversight in the technical transition from HBO Max to Max." The change--made by a company with a market cap that is approaching $30 billion during a contentious writers' strike--felt petty and vindictive to Hollywood professionals.