You know what the number-one thing that keeps me up at night is? It’s AI taking my job.” It wasn’t a factory worker telling me this. It was a straight-A student at one of the U.K.’s leading universities. The others participating in the focus group I was leading — students from the U.S., U.K. and Germany — all concurred. “It’s a ticking time bomb,” said another. “I’m really scared that because of AI I’ve got no chance of being hired.”

Fear that AI will decimate the job market is growing fast among the educated middle class — and not just among the young.

It’s a fear that is impacting their mental health. It is also threatening to impact who they will vote for.

In the same way that blue-collar workers turned in the 2010s to populists on the right such as Donald Trump in the United States or Marine le Pen in France because of the threat of automation, I expect to see the threat of being replaced by AI increasingly become a factor propelling voters toward a new cadre of populist politicians. But this time it will be white-collar workers driving the charge, and many will turn not to the right but to the left.

Far-left populists are clearly onto this. Taking a leaf out of their far-right counterparts’ playbooks, they have begun to shape an economic narrative that overtly taps into the anxieties of white-collar workers. A narrative which positions the architects and beneficiaries of the AI revolution as the enemy rather than immigrants; and pits the middle class against not the “mainstream media,” the “government” or the so-called “deep state,” but a demonised tech elite: Silicon Valley billionaires and the faceless corporations that replace human labor with algorithms.

“The richest people in the world are investing many hundreds of billions of dollars into AI” to make themselves “even more powerful,” wrote independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on X last month, warning of “massive” white-collar job losses, in addition to blue-collar cuts. In the U.K., Green Party Leader Zack Polanski, when asked for his thoughts on September’s much trumpeted announcement of a £31bn investment by U.S. tech companies to boost the U.K.’s AI infrastructure also didn’t hold back. “AI is deeply worrying for creative workers,” he said. “Tech bros, millionaires and multi-billionaires should not hold the cards here.” As for Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the man currently shaking up domestic U.S. politics, he told American venture capitalist John Borthwick in July that the risk AI poses to jobs over the next several years will be a focus of his administration if he is elected.

Take U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments earlier this month on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Washington, in which he talked about how the wave of investment into AI in the US “is only getting started,” continuing enthusiastically, “I think we can be in a period like the late 1800s when railroads came in, like the 1990s when we got the internet and office tech boom.” This despite the fact that less than two months earlier a Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed that 71 percent of Americans were deeply concerned that AI could put swathes of the country out of work permanently.

Desperate for economic growth and to benefit from the AI gold rush, incumbent politicians across the globe are increasingly gung-ho about AI while downplaying the considerable risks it presents to the public. A chasm is starting to emerge in many countries between how the public feels about AI and governments’ stated enthusiasm for the technology. And we’ve seen what happens when such chasms emerge: Opportunistic populist politicians step in.

In the same way that immigration has become a lightning rod for contemporary politics, I expect AI to become one over the next few years, especially around the issue of jobs.

A white-collar uprising is looming, and mainstream politicians had better be ready for it, armed with both concrete plans and compassion if they want to remain in office. If they are not, those on the more extreme ends of the political spectrum — particularly on the left — are likely to displace them.