What happens when AI disrupts societies primed to explode?

What will unemployment do to people already stretched to breaking point?

I believe in America. America has made my fortune… I went to the police, like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison—suspended sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool. And those bastards, they smiled at me.
So I said to my wife, “For justice, we must go to Don Corleone.”
Amerigo Bonasera, The Godfather, 1972

Angela Rayner has issued an ultimatum to Sir Keir Starmer, warning that the UK faces a repeat of last year’s summer riots unless “the government shows it can address people’s concerns”. In a dramatic intervention in the final cabinet meeting before the summer recess, the deputy prime minister said economic insecurity, immigration, the increasing time people spend online, and declining trust in institutions were having a “profound impact on society”.
David Maddox, Holly Evans, Independent, 22/7/25

The entire economic order is bankrupt--ideologically, politically and financially. If nothing changes at the fundamental level, the rich will continue to get richer at the expense of those priced out of the bubblicious assets, and the older generations will continue to accrue unearned wealth while younger wage earners are reduced to debt-serfdom and wage slavery. It doesn't have to be this way, but we're going to have to change our values and the fundamental structures of our economy if we want a different outcome.
Charles Hugh Smith, 1/8/25

Democrats are still favored on health care and vaccines, but on all the big important issues — on the economy, inflation, immigration, foreign policy, and even tariffs — Americans say they trust Congressional Republicans more. The 17-point gap on immigration and the 24-point gap on illegal immigration are particularly galling, since they come despite the recent backlash against ICE and mass deportations.
Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 1/8/25

The last time I was in Britain, a deeply concerned conservative said to me that he fears that a future fascist government is a real possibility there. He in no way wants to see it, but he doesn’t see that the political class in his country has the will or the vision to deal with the mounting crisis.
Rod Dreher’s Diary, 1/8/25

To be optimistic about AI is not to dismiss the risks, which are not limited to the labour market.
Dr Jim Chalmers, The Guardian, 3/8/25

Several articles had me thoughtfully stroking my beard over the last week or so. Let me summarise them for you, dear reader, then conclude by exploring what happens when you add the spark of (likely) abrupt and profound labour market disruption to the plentiful kindling of political polarisation, class resentment, intergenerational inequality and ethnic tensions.

David Brooks: The era of Big Government is just getting started
Nowadays, every political pundit and their dog is gleefully sticking the boot into an out-of-touch – and seemingly out of time – Professional-Managerial Class (PMC).

But David Brooks was doing it long before it was cool. At the turn of the Millennium, he authored an insightful and drily witty book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. It explored the fiscally conservative and socially liberal worldview (i.e. I don’t want any of my wealth redistributed downwards, but it’s no skin off my nose if gay marriage is legalised) so enthusiastically embraced by university-educated professionals from circa 1980.

A quarter of a century on from the publication of his justly acclaimed anthropological study, Brooks has written an equally insightful, if rather less amusing, op-ed about how the US has fared under the management of the bobos.

Brooks focuses solely on his own country, but many of the pathologies he identifies can be readily observed in other Anglosphere societies, as well as many Western European ones.

Brooks notes the core political debate of the last century was over the size of government. The 20th-century Left was keen on Big Government because it wanted to redistribute wealth and put a solid safety net in place. The 20th-century Right was keen on cutting taxes and regulations in the belief this would foster economic growth that would, yes, lift all boats.

Brooks doesn’t wade into that debate, instead pointing out that both Democrats and the Trumpian Republicans are pro-Big Government because small government is only an option in a well-functioning, cohesive society.

When society seems stable, the individual is seen as the primary political reality: How can we support individuals so they can rise and prosper — a tax cut here, a new social program there. But today, most people think America is broken. According to recent surveys, public trust in institutions is near its historical low… about two-thirds of Americans agree with the statement, “Society is broken.”

But what exactly do Americans mean when they complain that the society they once felt comfortable in has changed for the worse?

They see families splinter or never form, neighborhood life decay, churches go empty, friends die of addictions, downtowns become vacant, a national elite grow socially and morally detached. We have privatized morality so that there are no longer shared values. The educated-class institutions have grown increasingly left wing and can sometimes feel like a hostile occupying army to other Americans. When the social order is healthy, nobody notices; when it is in rubble, it’s all anybody can think about. Once the social order was shredded, small government conservatism made no sense.

Brooks then goes on to explore the supposed contradiction of populism. That is, its tendency towards – the horror! – social conservatism and fiscal liberalism.

People who feel that society is fundamentally rigged, unfair and chaotic turn to populists. Populism is an ethos that cuts across the categories of the big government/small government debates. Populists can be very conservative on social issues and isolationist and nativist on immigration issues but very progressive when it comes to redistributing the wealth.

Brooks goes on to deliver further unwelcome news for NYT-reading bobos.

[Trump] concentrates state power so he can go after the managerial class who he and his followers believe have betrayed America and destroyed the social order — civil servants, university administrators, journalists, scientists, and so on. The purpose is to use state power to, in JD Vance’s words, “overthrow the modern ruling class.” Trump demagogically once called this his retribution. But millions of Trump followers see it as their best shot at restoring order.

Then comes the really unsettling truth bomb.

The central argument of this century is over who can best strengthen the social order. In this contest, the Republicans have their champions and the Democrats aren’t even on the field… [Conservatives] instinctively understand the primary importance of the pre-political; those covenantal bonds that precede individual choice — your commitment to family, God, nation and community. They understand, as Edmund Burke argued, that manners and morals are more important than laws. The social order is the primary social reality.

Democrats are the party of the elite managerial class, and it’s hard for us affluent, educated types in blue cities to really understand the gut-wrenching disgust, rage and alienation that envelops the less privileged as they watch their social order collapse.

Wrapping up his bobo, dare I say, deconstruction, Brooks twists the knife one last time.

They [i.e. the PMCers who control society’s sense-making institutions] aren’t even willing to confront the core Democratic question: How does the party of the managerial elite adapt to a populist age?

Then Brooks pulls, the old preacher trick of offering a demanding but feasible route to salvation after filling the congregation with despair over their sinfulness.

If Democrats can come up with an alternative vision of how to repair the social and moral order, they might be relevant in the years ahead.

Yascha Mounk: Elites are blind to the epochal transition that’s now underway
Students of history are aware that events unfold both more slowly than you can imagine and more quickly than you can believe. Or to use what must now be Hemingway’s most enduring quote, historical events play out in, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

With 20-20 hindsight, it’s not hard to comprehend why Rome fell and the role complacent, self-interested elites played in the process. But while civilisations endlessly rise and fall, pinpointing exactly when the fall is going to happen is no simple task.

While a circulation of elites often seems predestined after the fact, it rarely seems inevitable in real time. For example, I imagine few French nobles would have guessed, even as late as 1788, that they’d end up guillotined in the town square in front of a bloodthirsty mob of commoners.

Life comes at you fast. Or as Mounk puts it,

Some momentous historical events, like the French Revolution or the demise of communism, come with little warning. Few contemporaries were able to predict that they were about to happen, or to foresee how fundamentally they would transform the world.

Mounk also argues that in much the same way few people at the start of the industrial revolution paid much attention to the factories popping up across Northern England, contemporary intellectual and media elites are underestimating AI.

What we are going through at the moment is, at a conservative estimate, analogous to the Industrial Revolution. The rapid emergence of sophisticated models of artificial intelligence has enormous implications for the future of the human race. If they are harnessed for good, they could liberate humans from hard toil, end material scarcity, and facilitate enormous breakthroughs in areas from medicine to the arts. If they are harnessed for ill, they could lead to mass immiseration, cause war or pestilence on an unprecedented scale, or even make obsolete the human race.

Mounk concedes there is no shortage of academic discussion, media coverage or Silicon Valley marketing bluster around AI. Nonetheless, he argues,

But even as the maturation of AI technologies provides the inescapable background hum of our cultural moment, the mainstream outlets that pride themselves on their wisdom and erudition—even, in moments of particular self-regard, on their meaning-making mission—are lamentably failing to grapple with its epochal significance…

Intellectually, I have become deeply convinced that the importance of AI is, if anything, underhyped. The sorry attempts to pretend we don’t stand at the precipice of a technological, economic, social and cultural revolution are little more than cope. In theory, I have little patience for the denialism about the impact of artificial intelligence which now pervades much of the public discourse.

Mounk concludes with a bipartisan burn that shows how dubious the conventional wisdom can prove to be, and how quickly the political landscape can shift.

For an astonishingly long period of time, you can pretend that democracy in countries like the United States is safe from far-right demagogues or that wokeness is a coherent political philosophy or that financial bubbles are just a figment of pessimists’ imagination; but at some point the edifice comes crashing down. And the sooner we all muster the courage to grapple with the inevitable, the higher our chances of being prepared when the clock strikes midnight.

John Birmingham and Garrison Lovely: It doesn’t have to be this way
There are now lots of interesting stats about ‘attitudes towards AI’ floating around. The ones I find most interesting are the global surveys. To summarise, the more exposed to wealth-inequality-exacerbating, middle-class-collapsing neoliberalism a people have been, the more pessimistic they are about the imminent Great Technological Leap forward.

Residents of the Anglosphere and Western Europe default to assuming that AI will be rolled out in such a way that it primarily benefits those in the top quintile of the income distribution while imposing significant costs on the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution.

If you were the cynical type, you might speculate this is because Anglosphereans (and Western Europeans) have become resigned to a social order and economic system where change – demographic, economic, political or technological – always somehow seems to end up further enriching those at the Paris end of the Pareto distribution while further pauperising the less fortunately located.

It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where Capital does what it did to Anglosphere manufacturing workers to Anglosphere knowledge workers. Many pink-collar and blue-collar roles will remain safe until sophisticated robots can be affordably mass-produced, but such affordable mass production is closer than most realise. Plumbers, pipefitters, paramedics, personal care assistants and pest control technicians probably have five years at most before the AI-equipped droids start coming for their jobs.

But as a handful of commentators are starting to point out, we can break the habits of a free-market-fundamentalist lifetime and ensure it’s not just those at the top end of town who benefit from AI.

John Birmingham devoted a recent Alien Sideboob post to explaining how one nation is embracing AI in an encouragingly Scandinavian fashion.

But this vast, ultimately unknowable alien machine mind we’re building to replace us as a species need not answer solely to Space Karen and the Zuckerborg or the murderous old clams of the CCP…

Schibsted, the Norwegian media and publishing company, built its own AI called NorLLM. But not in any way Silicon Valley would recognise. Unlike the Nazi-curious plagiarism engines of the Valley, NorLLM was trained only on high-quality content; Norwegian language books, both fiction and nonfiction, journalism, and government archives, all with full consent and cooperation from publishers and copyright holders. No scraping. No copyright side-eye…

NorLLM is open access, but not open season. Startups, public agencies, universities, and private companies can all use the model under clear licensing terms. What you can’t do is steal it, defile it, or pump it full of Elon’s brainfarts until it answers every query with anime porn and quotes from Mein Kampf in haiku…

In effect, it’s AI as a shared civic resource or public infrastructure. Oversight, governance, and a sense of responsibility are baked into the project's architecture…

If our national AI were to connect with publicly owned models in other countries, the data pool would rival the stolen resources used by private concerns, at least in scale. And arguably, it would far surpass them in quality. In that world, creators could be stakeholders. Unions, universities, writers guilds, even local governments or high schools could build their own AI tools, using them not to replace human beings but to support them.

Garrison Lovely made a related argument in a recent Guardian article. He noted that while technologies rarely get uninvented, humanity has pulled back from risky experiments in the past and could do so again. No nation has chosen to launch a nuclear attack on another nation since the US lost its monopoly on the bomb in 1949. Nor has any nation yet tried to clone a human being.

Lovely is realistic about the challenge ahead, but hopeful that the benefits of AI can be broadly distributed.

It’s obvious why so many capitalists are AI enthusiasts: they foresee a technology that can achieve their long-time dream of cutting workers out of the loop (and the balance sheet).

But governments are not profit maximizers. Sure, they care about economic growth, but they also care about things like employment, social stability, market concentration, and, occasionally, democracy…

Capitalists often get what they want, particularly in recent decades, and the boundless pursuit of profit may undermine any regulatory effort to slow the speed of AI development. But capitalists don’t always get what they want…

On the few occasions when Americans were asked if they wanted superhuman AI, large majorities said “no”. Opposition to AI has grown as the technology has become more prevalent. When people argue that AGI is inevitable, what they’re really saying is that the popular will shouldn’t matter. The boosters see the masses as provincial neo-Luddites who don’t know what’s good for them… Technology happens because people make it happen. We can choose otherwise.

Graph courtesy of https://x.com/NatHalberstadt/status/1951854992995889187

Time for some enlightened PMC self-interest?
Circa 1980, following the economic reversals of the 1970s, the PMC opted to defect from its loose New Deal alliance with the common folk and throw its lot in with the plutocrats. Almost half a century later, that’s an alliance that’s worked out brilliantly for the plutocrats and rather well for the PMC. Especially the high-flying C-suiter/management consultant/tax lawyer faction of the PMC.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out quite as bountifully for those who weren’t plutocrats or ensconced in the upper echelons of the PMC.

Yet even after the Gilet Jaunes, Brexit, Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall, Southport and the rise of populist political entrepreneurs, such as Santiago Abascal, Jimmie Akesson, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Matteo Salvini and Alice Weidel on the Right and AOC, Jeremy Corbyn, Pablo Iglesias, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani on the Left, incumbent elites are continue to party – and make policy – like it’s 1999.

Only now, the plutocrats are keen to leverage AI to disintermediate the PMC ASAP with the ultimate aim of getting rid of all their human workers, credentialled or otherwise.

Thanks in no small part to the free-movement-of-labour-capital-and-goods-championing efforts of “civil servants, university administrators, journalists [and] scientists,” societies that were once agreeably egalitarian, cohesive and orderly have become vastly less so. If AI unleashes the kind of unemployment many, including me, are predicting, that’s likely to be the spark that sets off a Helot revolt.

If those PMCers who’ve long enjoyed a “comfortable lifestyle” don’t want to end up getting badly burnt in the ensuing conflagration, they may want to consider changing course while they may still have time to do so. The Anglosphere’s descamisados – including many underemployed, surplus elite PMCers –are already desperate. They long ago abandoned hope of getting on the housing ladder and, in many cases, partnering up and having children.

If the future seems to promise nothing more than further penurious downward mobility, concluding in a heavily surveilled, UBI-dependent serfdom, don’t act surprised if they turn to a political gangster seeking justice.