Artificial intelligence promises brilliant advances and portends horrible disasters. If it causes the widespread structural job losses many predict, it will also likely usher in a new age of “hyper-meritocracy” and, in turn, a new kind of populist revolt against it. This revolt will be aimed not only at industry titans but at the ideal of meritocracy itself—a potent ideological tool that has been used to make deep inequality more palatable in our democracy.
Meritocracy is the answer to an intractable question: How to reconcile the egalitarianism of America’s democratic culture with the cold facts of social and economic inequality and limited upward mobility? In the postindustrial age, we’ve promised success through access to education and hard work—merit. This mantra cuts across the spectrum, from George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” to Barack Obama’s nationally televised exhortation to school children: “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up…. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.” What happens if that inflated pledge to school kids becomes a hollow promise to college graduates, and, eventually, to everyone left behind by the globalized economy? What will be the social and political blowback—and moral consequences—if, with AI’s help, we become a hyper-meritocracy, with vanishing room for success reserved only for an ever-shrinking elite?
To fully grasp the human and political consequences of AI-driven hyper-meritocracy, we first need to step back and examine meritocracy’s own defining flaw. In 1967, UC Berkeley political theorist John Schaar argued that the goal of meritocratic equal opportunity is not to redress inequality, but to make the system seem “fair.” Be warned, he cautioned, because purportedly fair races are extremely unforgiving. If you lose one, you have no one to blame but yourself. This kind of “equal opportunity,” he predicted, would leave us with an “oligarchy of merit” spiritually cruel to the losers and corrupting the winners into thinking they are “superior to common humanity.” Democracy demands, Schaar reminded us, that we hold “oligarchy itself to be obnoxious”—even one based on “merit.”
Fast forward more than fifty years. In his 2020 book, The Tyranny of Merit, Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel analyzes the political fallout caused by the flaw Schaar identified. Describing “credentialism” as “the last acceptable prejudice,” Sandel writes that while meritocracy elevates the status of technocratic elites, it depreciates the value of “most workers.” Leaving “many feeling disrespected and disempowered,” the philosophy has led to a “politics of humiliation” that “combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt.” Donald Trump, he observes, “was keenly alive to the politics of humiliation” and effectively exploited it.
From deep in Trump country, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s field work reveals how. Over the course of twelve years of interviews in Louisiana and then Appalachian Kentucky, the UC Berkeley sociologist found that liberals, including herself, missed the deep “emotional self-interest” that motivated many of these working-class people. Trump didn’t miss it. They were “in mourning for a lost [blue-collar] way of life,” living in a country that no longer felt like their own, in which “they yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame.” Then along comes Trump, offering a “giddy release from their estrangement.” Banded together with others like themselves, Hochschild found, they felt “magically lifted” and “no longer strangers in their own land.”
Now with AI, the politics of humiliation may well target a different “class”: the well-educated. Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei worries that 50 percent of white-collar entry-level jobs are at risk in finance, consulting, law, technology, and software. Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates predicts that “because it can see, listen, speak, and reason and will eventually do physical work just as smoothly as any human,” AI’s effect (and that of robotics) on jobs will cross sectors taking “on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing.”
Both think this economic transition is fundamentally different than earlier ones to which it is often compared. As Gates puts it, past technological transformations, such as from agriculture to office work, “proceeded over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required.” AI is happening much, much faster, and it “can substitute for human cognition.” Amodei cautions that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Therefore, as it matches “the general cognitive profile of humans…it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated.” If he’s right, AI productivity will produce more jobs—for AI.
AI threatens workers from a class that expects and, to a large extent, has experienced success through education. In the past, struggling industrial workers could be told—truthfully or not—that they ended up at the bottom because they failed to grab the opportunities education offered. What can be said to today’s postindustrial workers who get a good—and often very expensive—education and “do everything right”? How will those on top—the executives, experts, politicians, and investors whose livelihoods have managed to remain insulated—defend the new state of affairs?
It remains unclear. Some don’t fear a looming hyper-meritocracy at all. They believe that AI will “complement” and enhance human skills, particularly those of creativity, leadership, and learning, and will likely cling tightly to the old ideology of meritocracy. Others argue that AI may actually undermine meritocracy as an ideology that can justify inequality, by calling into question the idea that higher cognitive skills are essential to productivity and therefore deserving of copious rewards.
But if Amodei and Gates are right, AI will make meritocratic competition ever fiercer. It will put an even higher premium on education—though ideas over what and how to study will change—and other forms of career positioning, while vastly enlarging the pool of those who can’t make it. Rewards in wealth and prestige will further concentrate upward, even as many continue to claim that the growing inequality is “fair” because it’s based on “merit.” As an ideology justifying inequality, meritocracy is too effective for its supporters to quietly abandon, and it will remain difficult for its critics to unmask, expose, and dislodge because real talent and competence are so self-evidently valuable.
But if the decline of reasonably remunerative and prestigious jobs is too precipitous and steep, the reality of hyper-meritocracy will weigh heavily on the old-fashioned idea. The promise of success through education and hard work will become implausible for too many people. It will generate social and political blowback—a new populism with unpredictable consequences.
Pope Leo understands the stakes. An AI-driven moral crisis of hyper-meritocracy is exactly what he warns us of in Magnifica humanitas. In “systematically” sacrificing jobs in “the pursuit of greater profits,” he argues, AI “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision.” In that scenario, people will become mere “cogs” in an efficiency-obsessed machine, with many simply relegated to “forced inactivity.” As a result, he predicts, “a true social calamity,” one catalyzed by “a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace.”
Aware of many of AI’s serious problems and risks, OpenAI published “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” A call to modernize the “social contract,” it offers a panoply of ideas, from a “public wealth fund” to “pathways into human-centered work” to accountable corporate governance.
Those ideas and others deserve careful consideration and development, but worried students and recent grads won’t be an easy sell. Roughly half of Gen Zers think the “risks of AI in the workforce outweigh potential benefits.” By roughly three-to-one margins, eighteen-to twenty-nine-year-olds believe AI will take away rather than create opportunities, while making work less rewarding. At the first mention of AI during graduation this past May, boos rained down on University of Central Florida’s commencement speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield. Billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received similar treatment at the University of Arizona. The booing crescendoed when he tried to explain, “I know what many of you are feeling…. I can hear you.”
What young people really want to hear is that our leaders have a plan for replacing the jobs AI takes with meaningful and remunerative new ones. They are rightly suspicious of our profit-driven economy and money-driven politics, and skeptical that there would ever be a new “social contract” with the massive safety net it would need. OpenAI’s proposals can easily read to them like a mere public-relations maneuver.
Is Pope Leo’s encyclical similarly only a prayer? The pope understands the cost of doing nothing. “Technology is never neutral,” he writes, “because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” One test of Leo’s call for a more humane paradigm may be coming soon. Sam Altman, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all like the idea of a public wealth fund—in the abstract, at least. Sanders, however, has called for a 50-percent public ownership stake to create it. Will AI developers and their political allies really be willing to pony up to share AI-generated wealth in more than merely symbolic ways?
The disruption caused by AI is also an opportunity to determine what we truly value and to develop the promise of a brilliant and humane AI in light of it. Schaar called on us to treasure a greater pluralism of talents. Sandel urges that we stop ceding public goals to the global market. Hochschild’s interviewees cry out for equality of respect. Pope Leo fights to defend the human dignity of every person. Unless we act, a dangerous hyper-meritocracy in which few can aspire to do well or feel needed at all will undermine those goals. The ultimate irony is that from the pinnacle of capitalism’s pyramid, AI titans created a tool that may finally undermine faith in the meritocratic system they believe got them there in the first place.
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