The answer hinges on how severe and prolonged the economic disruption becomes—particularly for jobs.
AI backlash is rising—I see it every day in DuckDuckGo user feedback. That’s why our AI features (Search Assist and Duck.ai) are private, useful, and optional.
Concern alone won’t flood the streets—but if AI wipes out paychecks fast, and Washington stalls, more sustained protests and strikes could follow.
An April 2025 Pew Research report found widespread AI concern across various topics—jobs, privacy, inaccurate information, loss of human connection, the environment, and bias—but I think jobs can potentially lead to a categorically different societal reaction.
Cuts span industries, so outrage lands on both parties.
Every income bracket—from cashiers to coders—takes a hit.
Sudden, deep job cuts risk recession and years of high unemployment.
Privacy, inaccurate information, loss of human connection, and environmental harms are, of course, very real. Yet, each mirrors existing debates—data protection, misinformation, social-media outrage, and climate change—that have stirred headlines for years without sustained street action or sweeping federal reforms (our still-missing U.S. privacy law, for example). To be fair, climate activism has produced some huge U.S. marches—for example, 400,000 in NYC in 2014, 200,000 in D.C. in 2017, and 250,000 in NYC again in 2019—but these were single-day spikes rather than sustained efforts.
Bias is a little different. America did flood the streets after George Floyd in a more sustained manner, for many months, but major reforms stalled out once marches faded and partisan lines re-hardened. Job-loss protests have the potential to run even broader and longer because they could directly hit wallets across the partisan divide, for years on end.
The extent of the backlash depends on the size and duration of the economic disruption. As I showed in this Gallup-poll post, even most Republicans who believe tariffs will pay off say they’d tolerate at most one year of economic pain for those benefits. Patience for AI-driven job loss is likely just as thin, if not more so. If AI keeps unemployment high, backlash lasts until it recovers or Washington intervenes.
Two historical moments that resemble this pattern: When automated textile frames wiped out skilled jobs in the U.K. in the early 1800s, the Luddite riots turned violent enough (including killing a factory owner) that Parliament dispatched roughly 12,000 troops to restore order, which concluded with over a dozen executions. By contrast, in early-1960s America, still shaking off a recession and high unemployment, there was widespread fear that automation might be at least partially to blame and that it would cause high unemployment to persist. Ultimately, it spawned a presidential commission, but unemployment returned to normal relatively quickly, so the future everyone feared never materialized.
There remain many open questions, though, which I hope to explore more in future posts. For example…
Some jobs will clearly be displaced, which is already happening. But new ones will also be created. Will this be a large net negative, or will it be close to net neutral, similar to previous technology cycles? The public and “experts” are currently split on this question.
In our current survey, 64% of the public thinks AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. Far fewer experts surveyed say the same (39%).
Even if job displacement is closer to net neutral, the displaced people aren’t likely to be the same people who get the new jobs. What, concretely, are we going to do for them? Historically, we haven’t done much, for example, for people who lost U.S. manufacturing jobs. We can do better this time. Interestingly, the recommendations from the 1960s-era presidential commission included income guarantees, relocation assistance, federal unemployment benefits, education subsidies, and government jobs.
If intervention happens, who foots the bill—general taxpapers or the AI “winners” best positioned to do so?
We’ve already seen several strikes in Hollywood, an auto-worker strike (concerning, in part, increased automation), and a dockworkers strike (with similar concerns). But these were scattered enough in time that they haven’t yet coalesced into a larger movement, similar to other scattered past protests. If future effects take many years to unfold across industries, then a critical mass may never form to create a true reform moment.
If millions of jobs are displaced, there will be some economic disruption, but it could look very different from the past depending on if AI produces significant growth and productivity benefits, and in what timeframe. For example, it seems possible (though I have no idea right now with what liklihood) that unemployment spikes, but its GDP effects are offset by AI growth tailwinds that prevent a recession.
I need to dig in more, but the short answer seems to indicate yes, in a few ways. They seem make the people who attend them more politically motivated, at least for that issue. As a result, if enough people go to them, then they can swing elections.
On average, a wave of liberal protesting in a congressional district can increase a Democratic candidate’s vote share by 2% and reduce a GOP candidate’s share by 6%. A wave of conservative protests, like those by the Tea Party in 2010, will on average reduce the Democratic vote share by 2% and increase the Republican share by 6%.
But, can they actually change policy directly? Here, it seems pretty mixed, like in the examples mentioned above. The potential seems there, though, if they are large and sustained enough.
Recent protest movements seem more one-sided politically (e.g., climate change, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, etc.). Mid-century protests were arguably similar (civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, etc.), though they were sustained for much longer and ultimately swayed public opinion and accelerated change. A better parallel here, though, would be something that is clearly bipartisan from the start, more squarely on an economic issue, and resulted in swift reforms. Protests after the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire that sparked rapid labor reforms are a candidate.
If others come to mind, or if you have thoughts on these other questions, please let me know.
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Comments
By techpineapple 2025-05-2416:318 reply I don’t quite understand the full extent of the AI will create jobs argument. In prior revolutions, say automation, automation created jobs because like building and maintaining robots is a whole thing. Building and maintaining AI is a whole thing, but if you’re talking about wholesale automation of intelligence, the fundamental question I have is:
What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?
In the automation revolution, the bots were largely single purpose, the bots couldn’t be created by bots. There could and probably will be trillions of jobs created by AI, but they will be done by trillions of agents. How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it.
> What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?
Part of the problem is the definition of "AI" is extremely nebulous. In your case, you seem to be talking about an AGI which can self-improve, while also having some physical interface letting it interact with the real world. This reality may be 6 months away, 6 years away, or 600 years away.
Given the current state of LLMs it's much more likely they will create jobs, or change workflows in existing jobs, rather than wholesale replace humans. The recent public spectacle of Microsoft's state-of-the-art Github Copilot Agent[0] shows we're quite far away from AI agents wholesale replacing even very junior positions for knowledge work.
By creer 2025-05-253:44 > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?
Good question. And one where "in the immediate..." is not relevant. In the long term then, what?
One direction: Humans are not good for semiconductor fabs. Humans bring contamination of all kinds into a space that shouldn't have any. Humans can't help themselves and tweak things they are not qualified to. Humans can't help themselves and don't report changing conditions that they should. etc, etc. So that current fabs contain mountains of automation. And yet they also have lots of humans. Full automation is really difficult. It's more that automation creates the economic conditions that make it manageable to employ the remaining humans.
> How many jobs do you really create if ChatgGPT is so multi-purpose, it only takes one say 250k company to support it.
Is this very relevant? For example the entertainment industry - I expect - relies on just a handful of data centers for digital distribution. But creating the movies and TV shows employees insane numbers of people. The question is more "What does NextGenChatOpen enables, that it cannot exploit itself"?
By creer 2025-05-264:17 > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?
If we are looking long term, PART of the answer may be that asking about jobs is an insufficient question. Pending other unresolved questions, GDP is already not a good measure of standard of living anymore. Other measures such as happiness index are in their infancy but some people are thinking about alternatives.
So perhaps these non-AI jobs are non-jobs: humans living their lives instead of filling jobs. Which means whatever humans like to do: playing games (sometimes competitively), performing, hiking, collecting stamps, painting murals...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
If AI is roughly where IT is in the 60's, we might see actually decreased productivity for a while until people (yes people) figure out how to use it effectively.
By TheCoreh 2025-05-2416:46 The jobs created by the need to build and maintain robots (and industrial machinery in general) are very few compared to the amount of jobs the machines replaced. The new jobs that the industrial and other technological revolutions created were mostly in other economical sectors, like services and commerce.
By visarga 2025-05-2416:50 > What jobs will AI create that AI cannot itself do?
AI lack skin-in-the-game, they cannot bear responsibility for outcomes. They also don't experience desires or needs, so they depend on humans for that too.
To make an AI useful you need to apply it to a problem, in other words it is in a specific problem context that AI shows utility. Like Linux, you need to use it for something to get benefits. Providing this problem space for AI is our part. So you cannot separate AI usefulness from people, problems are distributed across society, non-fungible.
I am not very worried about jobs, we tend to prefer growth to efficiency. In a world of AI, humans will remain the differentiating factor between companies.
Jevons Paradox likely applies here. There could be an initial reduction in jobs, but longer term humans using AI will reduce the cost (increase the efficiency) of those jobs which will increase demand more than merely satisfy it.
Basically any job that uses a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, etc will all become more efficient and if Jevons Paradox applies, demand for those things will increase beyond the reduction due to efficiency gains.
I can imagine that for many fields it will be cheaper to have humans use AI (in the near term) rather than try to make fully automated systems that require no/little supervision.
By skywhopper 2025-05-2416:473 reply You’re just making things up here. LLMs or other forms of “AI” can’t do most jobs, so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform.
To the extent it can automate tasks under the direction of humans, it’s not even clear it makes those humans more productive, but it is clear that it harms those humans’ own skillsets (beyond prompt engineering).
I'm surprised cashiers are listed as the job most likely to be replaced in the graphics in the article. Unattended self-checkouts have been possible for like 15 years now, and it feels like 5 years ago was peak self-checkout, with some stores drawing back from entirely self-checkout experiences and expansion slowing in others.
My understanding is that the obstacles to stores replacing the remaining cashiers with self-checkouts is not so much "we need a better machine" but (a) the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing, (b) customers are slower at packing than cashiers, which can cause queues and other inefficiencies.
By HelloUsername 2025-05-2417:201 reply > customers are slower at packing than cashiers
Where I'm from, cashiers don't pack the groceries of customers
By rsynnott 2025-05-2510:21 Yeah, this makes very little sense. Around me, it's pretty much just self-checkouts now, outside of peak times. There's generally one manual till open to sell cigarettes, and that's it.
Tellingly, the newest supermarket in the area (Tesco, not any sort of weird startup) only has space for one manual checkout, plus about 15 self-checkouts.
By GiorgioG 2025-05-2423:58 I'm so sick of this hype. My (college-aged) teenage daughter works at a grocery store. Their new "AI" enabled cash-registers are supposed to show them which scanned items go together in a bag. It suggested: 4 packs of hamburger buns should go together in a plastic bag with 2 soda can boxes. Next it suggested a dozen eggs should go together with a gallon of milk.
Self-checkout won.
Every time I go to Target there are two lanes manned by staff. Everything else is self-checkout. This is every Target I go to in my state.
Every time I go to Home Depot, there is one person manning the checkout. Everything else is self-checkout.
Even fast food places have self-checkout stalls that seem to be growing in popularity. In the last few years, McDonalds has been rapidly deploying the tech.
Boba places. Self-checkout has been promoted to first-class and is the only way to order at several of them.
It's everywhere. When I was growing up, Kroger used to have every single checkout aisle staffed. Now they have one or two.
I'm honestly shocked that the perception is that self-checkout hasn't won. It's everywhere and dominates the checkout modalities.
> the shoplifting deterrence effect of staffing
This is all cost modeled. They have lots of cameras and security staff by the door. Even if the tech doesn't work, the mere threat of getting caught is enough to stop most losses. The business accepts that they won't catch everything. They're still saving money by using automated checkout.
curious how the ai experts are so wrong on truck drivers. apparent to anyone whos been on the road the US road system will be completely revamped before self driving cargo trucks are viable
By horhay 2025-05-2416:57 The thing about that recent rollout of self-driving trucks is they picked a stretch of road connecting Houston to another shipping point in a very straight line. And they bragged about 2000 "unassisted" miles on that stretch of road which is ~250 miles in length. So they're basically championing the idea that their trucks which have driven about less than 10 trips without an on-vehicle driver in that area is competent enough to be relied upon in a real work capacity.
Whether this amount of success is proof that there won't be any issues with the tech in that area, remains to be seen. Hell, they're not even interested yet in talking about how this may pan out outside their Houston trial runs.
Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.
April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0]
Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1]
Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2]
Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
