Unions have always represented workers, but perhaps the Digital Age will see the unionization of non-workers.

I don’t mean people who don’t want to toil but rather those who are simply squeezed from the system, with robotics and sensors thinning out the need for carbon-based employees. Since the Great Recession, American corporations have able to throw away any applicant with a gap on their résumé or any other blemish. If positions continue to diminish, we could be headed for a real-world Hunger Games.

In a Venturebeat essay by Flint Capital’s Artem Burachenok. the writer wonders if mass automation will bring about the return of a “feudalistic lack of social mobility.” If that comes to pass, he predicts potential reactions to this action. Like Baidu’s Andrew Ng, Burachenok believes a new New Deal may become necessary. Two of his entries:

2. The end of college. College loan debt has turned into one of the biggest budget black holes in the US today, with more and more students borrowing huge sums of money to finance degrees at all levels, in the hope of cracking an increasingly competitive job market. But in the near future, it won’t be their classmates that these grads will compete with – it will be the robots, and most will find themselves losing out. As a result, young people who aspire to more than a McJob will opt for trade schools where they can learn skills. Either way, they won’t need, or want, to go into hock financing a college education. The top-tier universities, of course, will be educating the children of the 1 percent; it’s the state and non-Ivy private colleges that will lose out.

4. A new New Deal? The last time there was a hollowing out of the middle class was during the Great Depression – and it took massive government intervention in the economy to set things right. The United States admittedly has a much more socialized economy now than it did in the 1930s, and special interests carry a great deal of weight in Washington nowadays – but as the full pain of AI is felt among the vast majority, there will be increasing pressure on politicians to do something.