What will happen to a country that loses its middle class?

Actually, it turns out that they can.

Over the years, it has been found that almost anything can be expressed in numbers. When you digitize something, perhaps a picture, you basically translate it into numbers. Numbers are the language which computers speak. And computers are much better at handling numbers than the human brain.

Almost any line of educated work can be done by software. The quality of the work which a computer delivers is only as good as the human-written software it is operating with. But once a first-rate practitioner of a particular skill — perhaps, translating documents from one human language to another — combines with a first-rate software designer, the end result renders that skill obsolete.

We have essentially designed artificial brains that are getting so advanced they can replace the biological ones. The decline of the middle class is not the result of jobs being outsourced to similarly educated workers in India or China so much as they are being replaced by software.

Each time a recession takes place, the people who lose their jobs are mainly the least profitable workers. And when the economy recovers, these jobs don’t return; instead, they are replaced by different ones. Statistics show that many jobs which disappeared in the Great Recession were middle-class ones, but the new jobs which are replacing them are mainly lower-class ones in the service field. Once a certain skill can be performed by software, the people who used to do it become very unprofitable in comparison. Human workers are expensive; they need food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, etc., and middle-class ones demand fairly hefty salaries. The quickest way to cut costs and maximize profits is to replace as many workers as possible with software. Basically, the economy has decided that it doesn’t need people anymore, at least not those whose skills can be replicated via software.

We hear a lot of talk from politicians about defending the middle class, but there’s really not much they can do. Our economic mentality is based on competition, and how does the human brain compete with a computer?

Preventing the inevitable fall of the middle class would demand a radical change in our attitudes toward competition, achievement and freedom, and that is unlikely to happen. The standard remedy to this looming social crash has been that those who lose their jobs to new technology need to be retrained to take advantage of the same technology — in the field of information management, perhaps. Maybe enough new middle-class jobs, of sorts which we cannot yet imagine, will be created to compensate for those lost. But computerization is all about minimizing the number of humans who need to be hired, not hiring more of them. And since we have such an uncoordinated, haphazard education system, large-scale re-education seems unlikely to happen anyway.

Maybe the software-driven economy of the future will deliver products that are so cheap that even the minimum-wage worker can afford a satisfactory standard of living. Or maybe not.

Technology is racing forward faster than ever before, and people do not know how to cope. How will people react? Contrary to what you might expect, revolutions seldom take place in stable, unchanging societies, even if the status quo is clearly unfair. It’s when things are changing rapidly, life is in flux, and people feel they are not getting their fair share that revolutions come about. On the other hand, democratic government tends to defuse discontent, because people feel they can make changes without resorting to violence. Does the average American feel that he or she is capable of making a difference in the course the country takes in the future? Or does government and those who hold power seem unresponsive and unlikely to change peacefully?

As countries that once were part of the Third World catch up to the advanced economies of the world, political scientists have noticed that democracy seldom comes about until a country develops a strong middle class. Poor people are too desperate to find their next meal to take part in politics, so they are largely ignored by ruling classes. The middle class, however, has some influence — money equals power. But what will happen to a country that loses its middle class? Will it devolve back into an autocratic state? The United States may be the country which gives us the answer.