The rise of artificial intelligence is reviving a familiar dread, one Studs Terkel documented in his 1974 work, Working: the “planned obsolescence of people.” While Terkel was writing amidst the early stages of computerization and automation, the current wave – the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution – presents a more volatile political horizon, extending beyond the blue-collar manufacturing base to encompass the college-educated, office-dwelling workforce.
The initial phase of the AI revolution was characterized by a content explosion, with generative AI and large language models flooding the internet with readily available text, images, and expertise. This phase warped media, education, and the economy of attention. We are now entering a more destabilizing phase: job loss, which is no longer a speculative future scenario but a present reality.
By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to executive-coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. While the January 2026 jobs report showed an increase of 130,000 jobs, a significant portion – 124,000 – was concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, industries largely focused on managing an aging population. An AI executive at a consulting firm indicated that recent model updates, specifically Opus 4.5 (launched in November 2025) and GPT-5.2 (launched in December 2025), have reached a threshold of reliability, capable of handling more complex tasks with fewer errors. “Most people don’t realise it yet. Now [AI] is at the level where I think we’ll start seeing real economic impacts this year, and it will snowball relatively fast,” she stated.
The trend is accelerating. January 2026 saw over 108,000 job cuts announced by American employers, the worst start to a year since the 2009 Great Recession, representing a 118% increase year-over-year and over 200% since late 2025. These cuts aren’t limited to startups; Amazon eliminated roughly 16,000 corporate positions, Meta pruned 1,000 jobs from its Reality Labs division, and Salesforce’s CEO acknowledged the loss of 4,000 customer-support roles due to AI tools handling approximately half the workload. This isn’t mass unemployment, but a subtle erosion of opportunity: fewer entry points, thinner career ladders, and a growing sense that the stability once associated with white-collar work is disappearing.
CEOs are openly advocating for reorganizing firms around AI to reduce costs. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicts AI could drive unemployment up by 10 to 20% in the next one to five years, potentially eliminating half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts most white-collar work will be fully automated within 12 to 18 months. This isn’t a conspiracy against professionals, but rather capitalism functioning as intended. If AI can achieve “good enough” performance in tasks like report drafting, coding, content moderation, or logistics optimization, the higher cost of a $120,000-a-year professional becomes unsustainable.
This shift will inevitably upend the political landscape, as jobs remain central to America’s social contract. As Franklin Roosevelt warned a century ago, “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” The tremors of past employment disruptions are still felt. In the 50 years since Terkel’s Working, deindustrialized communities have lost more than just jobs; they’ve seen the unraveling of unions, apprenticeships, and local economies, with displaced workers often relegated to precarious service sector roles. The promised “knowledge economy” absorbed only a fraction of the workforce, leaving many to navigate wage stagnation and social decay.
This past economic upheaval fueled a new political identity, one that fused material loss with cultural resentment. As unions weakened and Democrats focused on the professional classes, many working-class voters felt abandoned. This created a vacuum filled by MAGA and a right-wing populism that promised results, but ultimately delivered a politics of recognition.
The current AI-driven disruption is poised to flip the script, impacting white-collar workers. The response could mirror the reaction following the 2008 recession, with downwardly mobile millennials gravitating towards radical left-wing politics. However, an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse lacks the equivalent of the American Rescue Plan, and its impact will be felt more rapidly across institutions, as those experiencing job loss – journalists, lawyers, policy staffers – are also those who produce political legitimacy. A loss of faith in the system’s stability could lead to a volatile political climate.
Looking ahead, the AI revolution may necessitate a rewrite of the traditional liberal-conservative political spectrum. A realignment could occur around control of the “Means of Prediction,” as AI automates the “cognition economy.” This will likely reignite the debate around Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD), with governments potentially pressured to tax “robot labour” to prevent economic collapse. The question of whether AI will create a utopia of zero work and high income, or a widespread jobs apocalypse, will shape the political landscape.
The danger isn’t necessarily a coherent political movement or a technofascist state, but rather a fracturing of existing coalitions, leading to volatility, regulatory whiplash, and opportunistic demagoguery. On the left, there’s a growing skepticism towards technology and a call for the abolition of “bullshit jobs.” On the right, nationalist protectionism may clash with the needs of the global AI industry. The future remains uncertain.
the AI revolution represents a final test for American democracy. The Third Industrial Revolution taught factory towns that the future could arrive without them; the Fourth is delivering the same lesson to the laptop class. When millions are told, by code, that they are surplus, the response will be significant.
The Republican Party faces a particular squeeze. While many GOP lawmakers have enthusiastically supported Big Tech’s AI build-out, rank-and-file voters in data centre host states are increasingly concerned about the costs – from utility bills to grid strain – imposed by these facilities. Democrats are also navigating a complex landscape, attempting to balance support for AI innovation with concerns about worker protection and environmental justice. A bizarre alignment is emerging, with figures as ideologically opposed as Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis finding common ground in questioning the unchecked expansion of AI.
Sanders, along with US Rep. Ro Khanna, is traveling to Stanford to call for a moratorium on new AI data centre construction, arguing that AI should work for workers, not just billionaires. DeSantis has proposed an “AI Bill of Rights” to safeguard Florida residents and allow local governments to block new data centres. This convergence of views signals a growing recognition that the benefits of AI must be weighed against its potential costs.
