Human Waste: ADOS, AI, and the Manufacturing of Obsolescence.
When the Machines Arrive for the Forgotten. The American Dream is under algorithmic siege.
As artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation advance with breathtaking speed, a darker narrative begins to unfold. One not about innovation, but about elimination.
Not just of jobs, but of people. And while these sweeping changes cut across class and geography, it is no accident that those first thrown from the gears of the machine resemble those who were once forced to build it, Black American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS).
Behind the headlines that trumpet AI’s marvels, a dangerous ideology simmers; that an entire segment of the American workforce, particularly Black labor, and talent, is now seen by elites as expendable.
“Human Waste.” It’s a phrase not uttered aloud, but enacted in policy, investment, and silence. And it is accelerating a paradigm that could lock ADOS communities out of the future entirely.
A Legacy of Extraction: From Plantation to Platform
The origins of this unfolding crisis are not rooted in code, but in cotton.
For centuries, the U.S. economy was powered by the bodies of enslaved Africans. That labor was not paid, it was extracted. Generation after generation, Black Americans were systematically denied access to wealth, land, education, and the franchise.
Even when legally “free,” discriminatory systems—Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration—ensured ADOS communities remained disproportionately poor, policed, and politically disempowered.
In today’s digital economy, history does not repeat itself. It reprograms. And what the founding fathers termed as “less than or non-Human,” has evolved to Human waste.
Big Tech, driven by venture capital and protected by deregulatory policy, mimics the old extraction model: it harvests data (labor), deploys automation (displacement), and redistributes wealth upwards.
Only now, the overseer is an algorithm. The plantation? A warehouse. The whip? Code.
And just like in the old model, the Black worker remains structurally excluded from ownership, and now, even relevance. Looked upon by many as nothing more that human waste, or more specifically, as a Human Waste workforce.
The Rise of the “Useless Class” and the Recoloring of Obsolescence
Historian Yuval Noah Harari warns of a “useless class”: people displaced by technology, whose labor is no longer needed and whose skills are no longer marketable. But for ADOS, this prediction is not future tense, it is a growing lived reality. Especially in regions like Pittsburgh.
Black workers are overrepresented in industries most vulnerable to automation, including transportation, service, and logistics. And severely underrepresented in sectors shaping the future; tech, biotech, and AI.
Without intentional correction or committed Black leadership, this imbalance will solidify into a new caste: a digitally disenfranchised underclass seen not as underutilized, but as unnecessary. Chalked up as Human waste occupying large segments of a useless class.
This does not just deepen inequality. It reanimates an ancient hierarchy, only this time, one where social neglect is justified by market logic and not oppression. One that protects their actions from claims of discrimination and overt racism.
And as we are currently witnessing in real time, when people are no longer “economically viable,” society rationalizes their suffering. Cuts to education, housing, social safety nets, and healthcare are framed not as cruelty, but as “efficiency.” The disposability of Black labor is no accident. It is a feature of the coming system.
While systemic forces and technological displacement are central to the crisis facing ADOS communities, a more painful truth also demands attention: not all of the harm is coming from outside.
A significant portion of Black leadership has fallen into the trap of performative activism, offering symbolic gestures instead of structural change.
Teli own halls replace policy. Hashtags eclipse strategy. Diversity panels are mistaken for pipelines to power and authentic allies.
By prioritizing media optics, career protection, or political appeasement over grassroots mobilization, some leaders have grown disconnected from the urgent needs of those they claim to represent.
This performance of leadership, lacking knowledge, accountability, vision, and investment in emerging technologies, reinforces the very invisibility automation threatens to complete.
Without a radical shift toward informed, tech-literate, and justice-oriented leadership rooted in service, not spectacle, ADOS communities will be left clapping for inclusion at doors already shut.
True leadership must confront not only the system, but its own reflection and commitment towards true Black liberation in America.
Silicon Shackles: How AI Reinforces Historical Bias
Many believe AI is neutral. It is not. AI reflects the biases of the data it learns from and the biases of the people who design it.
This is especially dangerous for ADOS communities. Policing algorithms trained on racially biased arrest records reinforce systemic criminalization. Employment algorithms that screen based on language or zip code encode discrimination. Facial recognition tools misidentify Black faces at alarming rates.
Without meaningful ADOS representation in the development and governance of AI, these technologies will not just reflect history, they will re-enact it with computational speed and scale. With the purpose of eliminating human waste. Bias, once implicit, becomes automated.
And once embedded in code, injustice becomes harder to see, and harder to stop.
Economies Without Empathy: Capitalism in the Age of Disposability
At the heart of this crisis there is a deeper philosophical rupture, the severing of economic systems from human dignity.
Capitalism has always carried contradictions. But the current stage, financialized, globalized, automated, presents a uniquely inhumane model; maximum profit, minimum labor, zero accountability. Under this logic, people are not citizens, creators, or communities. They are cost centers.
And when profit becomes the only metric of value, those who cannot be “optimized” are ERASED, not violently, but quietly. Through layoffs. Through wealth deprivation. Through evictions. Through exclusion from opportunity pipelines. Though a complex system designed and functioning as if a human body would, naturally disposing of human waste.
This is not just unsustainable. It is immoral.
A nation cannot call itself free while discarding those who built its foundation. Nor can it innovate while ignoring the innovation locked within the very communities it refuses to fund.
Toward a Black Tech Future: Resistance Through Inclusion, Ownership and committed leadership.
But this story is not finished. It is still being written now.
A new generation of ADOS technologists, scholars, and activists are rising and can have an influence. From blockchain developers building decentralized economies, to educators reimagining STEM access, to artists interrogating surveillance capitalism through Black futurist lenses—these visionaries refuse to be erased.
The future does not need to repeat the past. But it will unless we disrupt it. But the cultivation of new leadership is essential.
Leadership focused on Tech equity, ensuring ADOS representation in ownership, not just employment, across tech sectors. Policy interventions establishing protections against algorithmic bias and AI-led displacement.
Alternative curriculum transformation, embedding Black history, ethics, and critical digital literacy into American education. Targeted community investment, funding Black-led and controlled innovation hubs, incubators, and capital pipelines.
Narrative power, amplifying ADOS voices in media, academia, and design of the digital commons and platforms. The aim is not inclusion for inclusion’s sake. It is tangible reparations through design. Liberation through co-creation.
The Future Can Not Be Automated Without ADOS
In this moment of seismic technological change, the moral question is simple: Who gets to exist in the future? Who will be considered human waste? What groups will be classified as a Human waste workforce?
To label people as “waste” is to strip them of their sacred humanity. But to design a future that honors every life, regardless of profit potential, is an act of revolutionary love and authentic humanity.
ADOS communities are not obsolete. They are essential. Not just for what they survived, but for what they imagined and fought for. For their humanity.
Because if America is to survive its own contradictions, it must build a society that sees every citizen not as a resource to exploit, but as a soul to uplift.
Hopefully, we will find a way to ensure we code that into the coming and emerging systems.
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