Kamal Ghorui
It only looks like it is.
A global survey by FGS Global, covering 20,000 people across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Japan, found that 73 percent believe life is getting harder. Seventy-four percent believe the system is rigged. Nearly 70 percent believe democracy is slipping. And more than 75 percent want to preserve traditional culture.
We are reading these numbers as political sentiment.
AI may get a passing mention, but rarely as the force shaping everything else.
We should be reading them as technological signals.
Because what this data captures is not ideology. It is anxiety. And not just economic anxiety, but something deeper: a shift in how people understand their own significance.
There is a pattern in human history that is so consistent it should qualify as a law. Every major technological disruption produces, within a generation, the same set of social symptoms: a surge in nationalism, a hardening of gender roles, a rise in scapegoating of visible minorities, an intensification of cultural policing, and a politics organized around the recovery of a past that, on examination, never quite existed in the way it is being remembered.
This is not a coincidence. It is not a failure of leadership, though bad leaders exploit it expertly. It is the predictable architecture of what I call significance anxiety, and it is the most important thing to understand about the world right now.
When a technological disruption arrives, it does not only change what people do for work. It changes the story people tell themselves about why they matter. And when that story is threatened, human beings do not respond rationally. They respond tribally. They reach for identity as armor.
Humans can survive uncertainty. What they struggle with is irrelevance.
The industrial revolution is the closest historical parallel to what we are living through with AI. When factories replaced skilled artisans in 19th century England, the immediate economic consequence was job displacement. But the deeper consequence was something more corrosive: the collapse of a meaning system.
A craftsman did not merely lose income when his skill became obsolete. He lost the story that organized his sense of self, his place in his community, his answer to the question of why he deserved to be here. The Luddite riots were not simply protests about wages. They were expressions of significance panic, the rage of people whose identity had been rendered surplus.
What followed, across the industrializing world, was entirely predictable in retrospect. Nationalism rose sharply. Gender roles hardened as the breadwinner myth crystallized, shifting women out of economic visibility and into domestic labour that was simultaneously sentimentalized and unpaid. Immigrant and minority communities became targets for anxieties that had economic origins but were expressed in cultural and ethnic language. Cultural purity movements proliferated. Political nostalgia became an organizing force, promising to restore a stability that industrial capitalism had actually destroyed.
None of this was orchestrated. It emerged from millions of individual responses to the same underlying experience: the sensation that the ground of significance had shifted, that the rules by which a person earned recognition had changed without consent, and that somewhere in the fog of disruption, certain people and groups were responsible.
We are watching an almost identical sequence unfold today, and we are making the same mistake our predecessors made. We are treating the political symptoms as the disease.
The scapegoating of immigrants in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe is not primarily a response to immigration. It is a response to AI anxiety expressed through immigration. The resurgence of traditional values movements from Hungary to India to Brazil is not primarily a response to cultural threat. It is a response to status disruption finding its expression in cultural language. The rage at elites and institutions is not primarily about any specific elite or institution. It is about the collapse of the merit narrative, the growing suspicion that the rules of the game have changed and nobody bothered to announce it.
In India, this dynamic carries a specific texture.
A generation of knowledge workers built their identity, and in many cases their family’s aspirational arc across multiple generations, on the premise that cognitive skill was the path to significance. The IIT, the MBA, the engineering degree, the software job: these were not merely economic strategies. They were meaning systems. They answered the question of who deserves to matter in a particular, widely shared way. When AI begins to perform cognitive work that was the exclusive province of this class, the anxiety that surfaces is not just financial. It is existential. And existential anxiety, historically, does not stay existential for long. It finds objects.
This is not a fatalistic observation. It is a diagnostic one, and the diagnosis matters because it points toward a different kind of response.
If what we are living through is significance anxiety expressed as political toxicity, then the interventions that address only the political symptoms will fail. You cannot argue people out of significance panic with better policy papers. You cannot counter tribal identity hardening with fact-checks. The anxiety is real even when its expression is misdirected.
What history does suggest, in the cases where disruption was navigated with something approaching justice, is that the transitions which went better were the ones where new social contracts were negotiated before the old ones had fully collapsed. Where institutions created new pathways to recognized contribution. Where the disruption was not merely managed from above but processed collectively, with enough space for grief, adaptation, and the invention of new forms of meaning.
We are not doing that. We are building AI infrastructure at civilizational speed while social contracts move at bureaucratic speed. We are generating abundance in cognitive output while doing almost nothing to address the redistribution of significance that abundance demands. We are watching the political consequences of this gap and treating them as a separate problem.
They are not a separate problem. The politics is downstream of the technology, not in the crude sense that technology determines history, but in the precise sense that significance anxiety is a predictable human response to identity disruption, and identity disruption is what major technological transitions always produce.
The question, then, is not whether AI will generate political and social turbulence. It already has and it will intensify. The question is whether we can name the mechanism clearly enough to respond to the actual disease rather than the symptoms.
Fire was dangerous and transformative and required new social contracts to govern it. The clock, and the factory system it organized, was dangerous and transformative and required new social contracts, most of them extracted through enormous conflict, to govern it.
AI is the same story. The disruption is not optional. The social contract is.
What we are watching today, the rage, the rigidity, the nostalgia, the scapegoating, are not aberrations.
They are signals.
They are the sound that significance anxiety makes when it is not met with an adequate response.
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