Lucas Chancel on AI will create a permanent underclass

Lucas Chancel

Economist; co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics

For some time now, we have seen Silicon Valley technoreactionaries dreaming of a world where they would create a colony on Mars, while an ultra-impoverished population remains on Earth because artificial intelligence would have destroyed many jobs: that's not a very appealing future.

AI Verified (Jun 4, 2026)

Source:

Lucas Chancel, quoted in Le Monde, “Thomas Piketty's lab proposes ambitious plan to cut global inequality and curb climate change,” June 4, 2026.