If you’ve opened a social media network or an internet browser in the last year or so, you’ve stumbled across some conspiracy theories that are more creative than some fantasy books, including for example Bill Gates’ plan to reduce the world’s population to 500 million people through the use of vaccines.  

Besides the elephant in the room – why with vaccines, the literal thing to decrease death rates – it also got me to think about something that is implicit in the protests and yet hasn’t been expressed that outwardly. 

What I am talking about is a disgust for the new elites – wealthy technology owners running successful tech companies. 

While the right enjoys criticizing Bill Gates with just weird and absurd lies, the left is more comfortable with criticizing Mark Zuckerberg for the lack of fact-checking on his platforms and Jeff Bezos for the crazy amount of wealth he has amassed without redonating every bit of it. 

And while some criticism is always good, what all of this actually points to – in my very humble opinion – is a new class system emerging as part of what I would call the technological reordering of society and classes.

So I prepared a lookout onto what those 4 classes will be, who they are composed of and what their everyday life will look like. 

The 4 classes of 2050

Something can be said for sure – there will be massive social shifts – we will almost for sure have a Universal Basic Income (UBI), a much bigger group of people without a job, companies will struggle to keep employees long-term and big technology companies will set more agenda than countries will, due to their lack of adaptation and agility to the changes of the new world. 

As you might have already guessed from my examples the line of division of the new classes are around technology and the classes’ individual participation and interaction with technology. 

Altogether, the future will be composed of 4 different classes. 

1. Technology Owners
2. Technology Creators, Inventors & Creatives
3. Technology Participants
4. Technology Excluded

With this said, let’s look into the details of each one of these classes. 

The Highest Class – Technology Owners

As the name suggests, technology owners own the technology that we use. 

I mentioned some of the names earlier, but let me give you some more examples: Only in 2019, Slack, Pinterest, Zoom, Uber and Lyft had an IPO, totalling close to $400 Billion in value. 

Behind every single one of these IPOs are several investors with a major stock in those companies, making a lot of money. 

Together you have those people that run these companies, quite often those that started the companies initially as a Startup. 

These people don’t only have insane amounts of money, but they also have access to the data of millions, sometimes billions of people. 

In a world where companies need to know more and more about their consumers to be more successful than their competitors, if you are an owner of a company or shares of a company that has access to mining this data, you have an unprecedented amount of power.

The power might reach so far that these people are able to set agendas. 

My country Germany can already today not keep up with legislation around the newest technologies. In fact Corona reporting is still happening mostly with fax machines. Some (though not many) countries are even worse. How are they to regulate AI and Machine Learning?

A company that constantly sparks innovation and has a lot of data to use is able to set agenda for their company, their users and eventually the world, influencing us so much that we carry it on to the politicians. 

One of the primary factors that this class will fight around in the year 2050 is the amount of UBI spent for the population. UBI will mainly be financed through the taxes they pay, and they are glad to contribute to that, as it will enable a large population without work to participate in society and consume their products and services. 

However, a paper producing company will want to provide a lower amount of their taxes towards a UBI than a Luxurious Yacht manufacturer, who would hope for a really high UBI for people being able to afford more diverse products, producing potentially more billionaires and therefore creating more customers for him. 

This is what the Highest Class is going to fight about in their everyday lives.

One more prediction that I will have is that the wealth differences with new technologies like 3D printing building become so apparent that the Technology Owners will want to separate themselves from other classes in the strive for individuality and to preserve their own safety and freedom. This is nothing new – gated communities are a reality in most of the Americas.

The most mixing with another class will be with the Second Class.

The Higher Class – Technology Creators, Inventors & Creatives

The next class is the ones keeping the technology running, and those ones largely contributing to the innovation in technology.  

The main factor setting them apart from the other classes is that they have negotiation leverage with the Technology Owners. 

The Technology Owners need the Techn Creators and Inventors to create, maintain and improve their technology. 

Therefore in 2050 we can expect salaries for this class to be a lot higher than today. Already you can see creatives on YouTube getting sponsorships worth Millions – values that even the most famous singers of 1950 would have only dared dreaming about.

Many technology creators will turn themselves into a brand and offer their services to Technology Owners. Others will take their own ideas and create a technology or product themselves. 

By this interaction they might gain shares or ownership of technology themselves and can move up to the highest class. 

They also have access to the best education and knowledge in the world, provided by the Tech Owners or paid by themselves. 

This education though will mostly be private and expense based as similarly to agenda education systems will not be able to hold pace with the speed of innovation. 

We can already see this trend starting today with people paying sometimes thousands of dollars for private courses for a new online skill or the next trend in programming.

They will live in wealthy situations, not extravagant but will usually be able to afford everything that today is described as Upper Class and potentially much more. 

In difference to Technology Owners, they won’t have to fear being recognized or hated against, and will mix fairly well with the rest of the population, similarly occupying cities, towns and villages with the other classes. 

If you want, you can see this class as a sort of Guardian Class, overseeing the AI and algorithms of the future and enabling the rule of the Technology Owners, the most able ones of this class becoming Technology Owners eventually themselves. 

The Middle Class – Technology Participants

If you had to draw a line between Technology Participants and Technology Creators and what indicated where one might land later in their life, the main divider would probably be education. 

As mentioned before private out-of-pocket education will be the main contributor to a wealthy life in the future. 

Technology Participants will be somewhere between barely able to afford private education to no chance of affording it and just trying to maintain their social status.

But who are they? 

Technology Participants are people that participate in the value creating process of technology, but are not creating the technology. 

That could be an IT Services Salesman, an accountant (if this job still exists) or about any other business or administrative function within their respective organizations not directly involved in creating technology. 

Also belonging to this are people of non-business related industries also digitizing, so for example a nurse or even a doctor could be part of this. 

Yes, doctors are not going to be part of the Higher Class. An algorithm writer for hospital software will earn more than a doctor in 2050. 

Again, the doctors job will be skimmed to much less actions – we already have robots that are much more precise in operations and we have Watson Health Advisor from IBM being able to diagnose illnesses much more precise than any doctor can do. 

Altogether, the middle classe’s composition won’t change drastically in comparison to today. 

Just some movement from the top down, and some movement of the middle class to the lower class. 

However, their lifestyles will have changed a lot. 

With technology entering their homes and all kinds of new possibilities on how to consume and spend their money, the middle class will have a lot more wealth than today’s middle class. 

They will have better health and better education. 

So it will change positively also for them. 

They will live together mostly with the Technology Creators in cities and towns, avoiding the poor neighborhoods of the Lower Class. 

The Lower Class – Technology Excluded

So who will be the new Lower Class? 

They are what I would call the Technology Excluded people. 

People that don’t participate in any of the value creating activities of technology. 

Of course you will have people without work here. 

But sadly what you will also have is people with a job like elderly caretakers, or social workers. There is little to no technology involved in what they do, and they will barely receive more than the UBI. Unless those jobs will be replaced by technology, but even then human to human interaction is part of their job, so likely only some parts will be replaced.

This might cause a lot of social conflict in the future. 

We already have discussions about the essential workers and how little they are being paid, but since their jobs also don’t involve a lot of technology I see that situation only increasing. 

Another category will be basic jobs that can’t be filled by robots yet. 

But the most people of this group will simply be out of work, living from UBI, sort of living their days away in virtual worlds (Ready Player One style). 

They will live mostly in their own secluded neighborhoods, however not in precarious situations (not in the Western World at least) as UBI will settle a great deal of improvement for their lives. 

New technologies will help for more wealth for this class too, but it will not get any closer to what they are to the middle class today. 

If you want to look for an example of what this would look like, some south London neighborhoods could serve well for this. 

Essentially their own worlds with people mostly off work and nothing to do, they do a lot of activities that would help pass the day. Grime originates from this neighborhood and is a reflection of what their daily lives look like. 

Now take that but spin it into a lot more wealth and technology, that is how I would imagine these new lower class neighborhoods to look like. 

Some additional notes

What I will see most of you saying now is “Wait Philipp, not every industry will be determined by technology, what about farming or Road Construction” but to this my answer is simple – Every industry is getting revolutionized by technology. 

Some maybe a bit less, some more, but especially with AI on the rise, this will take over a large portion of every industry and revolutionize how things will be done in these sectors of our lives. 

I have been working at two different tech companies. Both have solutions for every single industry, for governments, for the social sector and for any other imaginable part of the economy, state and the third sector. 

And also both of those companies and all of their competitors have customers in each and everyone of those sectors.

If you don’t yet understand this in detail, I would recommend reading this article.

The class system of the future

With this you now have an overview of what I think the class system of the future will look like. I might be coming back to this article in the future, revisiting certain aspects in more detail.

From what I can determine, the best thing you can do for yourself is to educate yourself about coding and programming and how technologies and societies in the future work. 

I am doing this constantly, learning more just about every day. 

There are two things that stood out to me thinking and researching about this topic. 

First, everyone is going to be a lot more wealthy. 

Not because they necessarily have a lot more money – they do have a bit more money, but it won’t skyrocket in comparison to today except for the first two classes. 

But because technology will lead to such a massive reduction in prices for about almost anything. 

3D Printed houses will possibly cost half or less of what a new house costs today (which will increase demand for grounds – possibly creating a model of renting ground to build your own house on). 

Robots will improve efficiency and decrease prices by such an amount unimaginable today. 

And then we have convergences between many industries. Example? Tesla seems to be collaborating with the UK government about using their new batteries in the car as a passive energy storage for overproduction, leading to a potential concept of cars being charged up during the day and then feeding back energy at night. 

This could lead to the government paying an incentive for you to buy such a car. 

Second, the classes are going to be more rigid than today.

The second thing standing out was that the classes are going to be more rigid. Education will be more and more hidden behind money barriers, and classes will enter more and more a state of dynastic passing on. 

UBI will not actually be the great equalizer, it will be the Highest Class’ peoples offer to not have riots and to have their products and services being bought so they can make even more money. 

This is a double edged sword, people are more wealthy but the inequality will also increase. 

So with this thought I will leave you to yourself. 

Let me know what you think about my predictions and how I might be wrong in the comments or via Mail or on Instagram and Twitter. 

As always, I am going to answer everyone. 

Until then 

Philipp