Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk have warned that artificial intelligence will bring profound "social unrest." These warnings are routinely dismissed as Silicon Valley theatrics, a comforting habit that says more about governments than about AI. After all, institutions prefer to believe disruption arrives slowly, politely, and well within the lifespan of a policy committee.
This attitude isn’t limited to Washington or Brussels. It’s common in governments like Nepal’s, where policymakers think technology will wait for bureaucratic approval. This misplaced confidence suggests that AI expertise in Nepal is somehow better informed than that of Pichai and Musk.
Musk, however, also provides what some encouraging news. He claims that saving for retirement may become unnecessary. While this might sound like a provocateur’s claim from Silicon Valley, the real issue is not whether Musk’s vision of universal income will become reality. It’s the fact that dismissing this idea reveals how unprepared today’s leaders are for a world where AI changes jobs, wages, and the idea of retirement itself.
From Seoul to Paris, Barcelona to Jakarta, young people are protesting. Their demands may differ, but their anger unites them. This unrest signals something political leaders fail to understand: a generation sees dangers that those in power either cannot or do not want to acknowledge. The social contract that has held the postwar order together is breaking down, with AI acting as the catalyst.
The Collapse of Entry
Past technological changes have taken away jobs. AI is eliminating something even more fundamental: the path into economic life. Entry-level jobs, internships, junior analyst roles, and assistant positions are disappearing. These were never just jobs; they were the social pathways where young people learned skills and a sense of belonging. Their absence goes beyond mere unemployment. A society can manage job losses and sector changes, but it cannot easily survive when millions are denied entry altogether.
Yet governments, mainly led by Gen X and Boomer leaders, cling to outdated solutions. They propose retraining programs and skills classes. "Learn to code" has changed to "learn to prompt." The underlying assumption—that workers can simply keep up—overlooks a harsh new reality: in an AI economy, expertise is becoming worthless faster than policies can adapt.
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Meanwhile, some millennials are positioning themselves as middlemen rather than challengers. They seek to profit from disruption and repackage Gen Z’s unrest as an opportunity. What began as a generational divide last September is already fitting into a familiar pattern: capitalism looking to profit from a revolution it did not start?
When the System No Longer Needs You
Social unrest arises not when people lose their jobs but when they lose their sense of worth, when the system that once relied on them no longer needs their input.
This is the generational divide that political leaders misunderstand. Older generations faced disruption that was painful yet manageable: factory closures, outsourcing, wage stagnation. Today’s youth confront something fundamentally different: systematic exclusion.
AI doesn’t just lower wages or reduce bargaining power. It makes them irrelevant. You can’t strike against an algorithm. You can’t negotiate with a software model. As technologist Tim O’Reilly noted, when you replace wages with cheap automation, you don't just disrupt labor markets; you disturb the entire consumer economy built on them.
When income is no longer linked to participation, resentment fills the void. Politics becomes harsh instead of hopeful. Institutions lose credibility. This fuels protests in capitals around the world. It’s not a clear ideology driving the demonstrations; it's a shared grievance: the future is being shaped without us, and those controlling it appear indifferent.
The Poverty of Abundance
Universal basic income or Musk's optimistic idea of universal high income often comes up as a solution. However, money without purpose does not create stability; it leads to pacification. Governments excel at distribution but lack a framework for meaning.
For generations, work has been the backbone of adult life, defining identity, status, structure, and contribution. AI threatens to erode this foundation without providing a replacement. Even Musk seems uneasy about this: "If you actually get all the stuff you want, is that the future you want?"
A society with material security and ample free time isn't necessarily stable. History shows that when dignity, agency, and direction are missing, trouble follows. The protest signs held by today’s youth show this clearly: they aren’t asking for traditional jobs. They want futures they can create for themselves—futures they feel they won't receive.
The Fatal Mismatch
The most dangerous assumption among policymakers is that there will be enough time. Time to create regulations, to reform education, to update labor laws for a new age. But there won’t be.
AI doesn’t respect institutional timelines. Once technologies are capable, they deploy immediately and globally. Capital flows to efficiency at machine speed, while policy changes happen at the human pace of committees, legislative sessions, and election cycles.
This creates a critical timing mismatch. Every delay builds frustration. Every legislative session spent in denial deepens public distrust. By the time unrest becomes undeniable, the causes have already become part of the structure.
What History Will Record
The failure isn’t a lack of information. Political leaders know that AI is powerful. The failure is in imagination and determination. Those in charge continue to act as if human labor is still essential, as if the economic and social structures of the late twentieth century are still relevant. That belief is already outdated.
This moment is especially fragile because the old perspective still dominates public discussions. Most statements from political figures, bureaucrats, and opinion-makers, along with much of the daily news, remain tied to a reality that is vanishing. The debates, promises, and proposed reforms mostly refine systems that are already being hollowed out by automation and algorithmic management.
Political parties approaching elections defend this waning world with increasing fervor, but offer little insight into what might come next. The real danger lies not in a sudden collapse but in a quieter failure: institutions continue to operate procedurally, even as they lose touch with the conditions they are meant to manage.
Retirement may indeed become irrelevant, as Musk suggests, but not because we have moved past work and scarcity. Rather, it’s because the foundations of modern governance—that labor produces value, that participation guarantees income, and that systems rely on people in familiar ways—are steadily fading.
Many young people protesting in cities around the globe seem to grasp this intuitively. They feel the ground shifting beneath them while leaders continue reciting scripts written for another era. This is a generation raised on digital immediacy and virtual consequence, where systems can be reset, rewritten, or abandoned entirely. Their relationship to institutions is fundamentally transactional, not reverential. When those leaders finally look up, they may find the audience has not quietly moved on, but grown willing to force a reset by any means available. History suggests societies rarely recognize that moment until it is already too late.
