As AI automates entry-level white-collar jobs, a growing number of college graduates will face unemployment. This creates what historian Peter Turchin calls 'elite overproduction'—people educated for elite roles with no positions to fill. This disenfranchised group is a prime demographic for socialist movements.

States and corporations will not permit citizens to have AIs that are truly aligned with their personal interests. These AIs will be hobbled to prevent them from helping organize effective protests, dissent, or challenges to the existing power structure, creating a major power imbalance.

The most immediate danger of AI is its potential for governmental abuse. Concerns focus on embedding political ideology into models and porting social media's censorship apparatus to AI, enabling unprecedented surveillance and social control.

Liberal democracy’s rise coincided with the need for a productive populace for economic and military strength. As AI replaces human labor and soldiers, the state's pragmatic incentive to empower citizens and protect their freedoms disappears, risking a return to authoritarianism.

Even if AI is a perfect success with no catastrophic risk, our society may still crumble. We lack the political cohesion and shared values to agree on fundamental solutions like Universal Basic Income (UBI) that would be necessary to manage mass unemployment, turning a technological miracle into a geopolitical crisis.

Public fear of AI often focuses on dystopian, "Terminator"-like scenarios. The more immediate and realistic threat is Orwellian: governments leveraging AI to surveil, censor, and embed subtle political biases into models to control public discourse and undermine freedom.

When a state's power derives from AI rather than human labor, its dependence on its citizens diminishes. This creates a dangerous political risk, as the government loses the incentive to serve the populace, potentially leading to authoritarian regimes that are immune to popular revolt.

While AI may eventually create a world of abundance where energy and labor are free, the transition will be violent. The unprecedented scale of job displacement, coupled with a societal loss of meaning, will likely lead to significant bloodshed and social upheaval before any utopian endpoint is reached.

Unlike gradual agricultural or industrial shifts, AI is displacing blue and white-collar jobs globally and simultaneously. This rapid, compressed timeframe leaves little room for adaptation, making societal unrest and violence highly probable without proactive planning.