The world doesn’t need most of us anymore—and maybe it never did.
As automation accelerates and AI matures, more and more of the human population is quietly being rendered obsolete. Not in some theatrical apocalypse, but in slow, bureaucratic suffocation: rising costs, collapsing access, social disconnection, and shrinking opportunity. It's already happening. We just don’t have the words for it yet.
In a way, this isn’t new. As society advances, the barrier to entry rises. Education gets more expensive. Jobs require more credentials. Housing is out of reach. Having children becomes a luxury. The result? Fewer people make it through the filter. Everyone else is, politely, excluded.
This is evolution by other means—natural selection outsourced to markets and algorithms. In the coming century, we won’t just see inequality. We’ll see irrelevance. Large swaths of the population may suffer quietly, stop reproducing, and fade out of history—not by war or plague, but by being economically unnecessary.
Eventually, what’s left is a techno-aristocracy. A smaller, curated population—backed by AI pensions, aligned with major tech firms, and born from genetically screened embryos. Dating might look less like romance and more like strategic affiliation: Which AI firm pays your UBI? Which genome company designed you? What legacy are you optimizing for?
It sounds dystopian, but it’s just momentum. A quiet culling. Not through violence, but through optimization. The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to.
And unless something fundamental changes, the future will be one long, narrowing funnel.