AI Is the greatest grievance machine ever

Artificial intelligence is on its way to becoming the greatest grievance-producing machine the world has seen. Economic revolutions have always been followed by powerful backlashes on the part of the aggrieved. In Britain, Luddites smashed the power looms that took their jobs in the 1810s and, in the U.S., populists raged against the giant companies that reordered their lives after the Civil War. Unless properly handled, the AI transformation will produce rebellions on a scale we have never seen before.

Economic revolutions produce grievances for three main reasons. They disrupt established ways of doing things, make a small number of people exceedingly rich, and deprive workers and citizens of a sense of agency. Resentment can smolder unnoticed, but then suddenly catch fire in the form of populist movements, wild conspiracies and violent assaults on machines or people.

Luddites smashed more than a thousand machines between 1811 and 1817, and the British government deployed as many as 14,000 troops to crush them. U.S. populists demonized the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie as "robber barons" and engaged in violent strikes. English weavers complained not only that their skills were being devalued but that they were losing control of their own lives. Americans believed they’d fallen into the hands of inhuman corporations.

All these reasons for mass outrage are present in exaggerated form in the AI revolution. It is happening much faster than any antecedent. Four decades passed between Edison’s first public demonstration of electricity in 1879 and many regular Americans getting access to the new magic. ChatGPT reached 100 million users within months of its 2022 launch. Big Tech is betting on the change gathering pace: Spending on AI could reach $2.5 trillion by the end of 2026 and even cash-stuffed companies are borrowing heavily. The World Economic Forum reckons AI might displace 92 million jobs by 2030.

Though the tech barons were already approaching robber-baron levels of wealth before AI kicked in, the new boom offers the chance of far larger fortunes — trillions rather than billions. There are risks, of course, even for the richest. Investment frenzies are usually followed by busts. But the 19th century railway revolution suggests the burden of failure generally falls on regular investors and that the big names, like Leland Stanford, end up better off than ever.

The largest problem of all is agency. Apply for a university place or a job these days and there is a good chance you will be told "algorithm says no." Software is taking over all sorts of functions, from the routine (such as assessing an employees’ performance) to the alarming (choosing targets on a battlefield). Is there anything more infuriating than being told your work isn’t good enough by a chatbot? Or anything more dehumanizing than being told your child was collateral damage in an AI-guided strike? In the usually tech-friendly U.S., one poll found that 66% of voters are fearful of AI; another found that 40% of Americans fear losing their job to technology, up from 28% two years ago.

People respond to lost agency in diverse ways. Some turn in on themselves in a state of existential angst. How can we live in a world where vital decisions are made by formulae that live in the clouds? Others look for people to blame. Tech barons have made themselves targets for popular anger not just because of their wealth, but because they warn of the dire consequences of their AI offspring and go ahead anyway. Alex Karp, the boss of Palantir, has predicted that AI may produce "deep societal upheavals," while OpenAI’s Sam Altman has speculated that some job categories could be "totally, totally gone."

Anti-AI grievance will reshape global politics more than anything else in the coming years, even more than the tide of refugees flooding into the rich world. It will reconfigure populist movements, create fissures in mainstream parties and perhaps even create a new type of terrorism. Much of what is to come can already be seen in embryo.

As with AI itself, the U.S. is leading on anti-AI populism. Left-wingers and right-wingers who fight about immigration are forming alliances. Bernie Sanders on the left and Josh Hawley on the right often seem interchangeable on the technology’s threat and the need to regulate before it’s too late. Populists are using these worries to reach out to middle-of-the-road voters. Data centers, which combine dystopian ugliness with a voracious demand for water and electricity, are a target in Red and Blue America, with 48 data-center projects, worth $156 billion combined, blocked or stalled by locals in 2025.

AI angst could redraw the populist fault line between "them" and "us," with "them" representing an ever-smaller group of people. It also has the potential to wrong-foot some traditional populists. What will Britain’s supposedly pro-business Nigel Farage do when AI replaces immigration in the list of ordinary people’s anxieties?

The grievance machine is also creating tensions within established parties. Mainstream Democrats are being pulled in opposite directions by high-tech business supporters and grassroots followers. Republicans may be instinctively more pro-business than Democrats, but they must cater as well to a coalition of traditionalist Catholics, anxious workers and data-center NIMBYs. President Donald Trump has typically dealt with this divide by hurling a few fiery words at AI but generally allowing Big Tech to do what it wants. That’s unlikely to suffice in future.

The trouble with resentment is that it can explode into terrorism. A glance back at the Luddites in the early 19th century or the U.S. populists in the late 19th century suggests society would be foolish not to prepare for the possibility. 

The U.S. suffered two AI-related terror incidents in April this year alone. One man was allegedly discovered in San Francisco carrying a jug of kerosene and a list of names and addresses of company executives, including Altman. Some 2,000 miles away, an Indianapolis city councilman, who had supported a data center’s construction, woke up to find that 13 rounds had been fired into his house and a note under his doormat reading "no data centers."

Yannick Veilleux-Lepage at the Royal Military College of Canada warns that we could see anti-AI groups adopting similar violent tactics to earlier groups like the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front and the Animal Rights Militia. Tech executives now have security details and data centers are heavily guarded, but he worries that extremists could go after people and institutions lower down the food chain.

AI companies are harnessing some of our best minds to grapple with the technological complexities. Society at large, hopefully aided by the more responsible members of the tech community, needs to employ people from other disciplines — history, philosophy and political science — to grapple with deeper questions: How can we absorb this change without too much disruption? How can we distribute the profits of innovation so they don’t end up just swelling an oligarchy’s fortunes? And how can we prevent populist anger from boiling over into terrorist rage? Without satisfactory answers, a great industrial leap forward may produce unendurable political instability.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."