The politics of AI and people power
The adoption of AI and its impact on our lives gives us a chance to reshape our politics. A guest post.
There is something almost moving about watching middle-class white-collar workers encounter, many for the first time, the same economic turbulence that has shaped the lives of others for decades.
For a long time, many felt protected by their qualifications, their specialised knowledge and their relative stability. They could worry about inequality without feeling personally threatened by it. Their relationship to capitalism’s volatility was often observational rather than experiential.
And then came AI: a technology capable of performing the very cognitive tasks that once defined their status and security. Suddenly, layoffs, restructurings, and uncertainty are no longer distant concerns but lived realities. The ground beneath them has shifted.
A newly radicalised middle
For many professionals, this is the first time the future has felt smaller rather than larger. It is disorienting, and in that disorientation, some are becoming politicised in ways they hadn’t expected. Questions about power—who has it, who doesn’t, who benefits, and who loses out—are no longer abstract. Some speak earnestly about joining the broader working class, sensing a shared precarity emerging.
Yet for many workers in long-underappreciated sectors—care, hospitality, retail, construction, manufacturing—this new sense of crisis among professionals can feel complicated. Not unwelcome, but not entirely shared. These workers have experienced economic insecurity for years, often while watching others enjoy the stability and advantages of the professional class. So when professionals say “we’re all in this together,” it can ring both true and not quite true.
Still, this convergence of anxieties may be one of the most important social shifts of our time. And as newly unsettled professionals turn to action, familiar—and largely failed—theories of change are likely to emerge that echo the climate movement.
The professional AI resistors
Some will respond through the channels they know best: organisation, analysis, and institution-building. They will found research groups, set up nonprofits, assemble advisory boards, publish thoughtful reports and try to influence policy. Many will come to these efforts with genuine conviction and a sincere desire to guide AI toward the public good.
This kind of work matters. It provides knowledge, frameworks and visibility. It helps shape the public conversation and can sometimes slow or redirect harmful policies. But it also carries risks familiar from the climate movement: an overestimation of how far research and expert guidance can shift entrenched political and economic interests. Information is crucial, but information alone rarely transforms power.
The AI activists
Others will turn toward more direct forms of action: public demonstrations, blockades, creative disruptions, pressure campaigns. Drawing inspiration from climate activism, they will bring passion, urgency and visibility to the growing concerns around automation, inequality and technological governance. Their work is equally important: it raises alarm bells, galvanises publics and signals that ordinary people are not passive spectators to technological change.
And yet, activism also has limitations when it stands alone. Media attention does not automatically translate into structural leverage. Visibility helps shape the terrain, but it does not itself redistribute power.
A shared limitation, a shared opportunity
Both the professional resisters and the activists bring valuable tools to the table. But both often treat politics as an arena of persuasion rather than contestation; an arena in which the goal is to influence those already in power rather than to expand or reconfigure where power actually resides.
The challenge is not that these approaches are misguided; it’s that they cannot, by themselves, rebalance the forces shaping AI’s impact on society. Governments see AI as a competitive advantage. Corporations see it as a path to efficiency and profit. Neither will change course solely because reports are published or protests held, even when those efforts are morally and intellectually compelling.
Don’t influence power, take power
AI’s widespread adoption is likely inevitable: not as a singular existential threat, but as a force reshaping labour, industry and social relations. But inevitability does not equal helplessness. The key question is not whether AI will be woven into our world, but who will shape that process and who will share in its benefits.
Research, advocacy, protest and public education are all necessary for this work. They illuminate problems, propose alternatives and rally people. But history suggests they are not sufficient on their own. For society to chart a fair path through the AI transition, working people—professionals and long-marginalised workers alike—will ultimately need to build forms of collective power that go beyond influence and toward agency.
Professional resistors, activists, workers, and communities each hold part of the puzzle. But the long arc of economic transformation shows that real change comes when people organise together not only to influence power, but to take power: to assert democratic control over the systems that shape their lives.
The arrival of AI is not just a technological moment; it is a political one. And our task is not merely to respond to it, but to shape it.
Joseph Gelfer is an organising member of Our Fair Future.
Hey! Festival, Manchester - St George’s Day, 23rd April, 2-8pm, Cross Street Chapel
Join us for a day celebrating books, art, songs and political heroes (especially women) as Hey! Festival lands in Manchester on St. George’s Day. Featuring ballad singer Jenn Reid, Costa Book of the Year winner Monique Roffey, and many more. Celebrating faith and art, reckoning with national identity, and taking part in free writing workshops throughout the day. The Hey! day ends with a live episode of Good Neighbours. Get your tickets here:
Elsewhere in Absurdity...
A blessed day to everyone, we survived nuclear war waged by psychotic paedos of the Epstein Class for one more day. As our Alanna says, make sure to touch some grass today folks 🌅❤️😅 and remember that we are the “caring majority” (framing which we like from Zack Polanski). This week...
- Charlie charged-up on cosmic energy by hugging the Avebury stones, and is tonight off to see Myanmar’s finest hardcore punks, The Rebel Riot, so fuck knows what state he’ll be in by tomorrow.
- Clare had dinner with Belarus Free Theatre, our friend Carole Cadwalladr, and Stephen Sackur plus wonderful team at Barbican in their conservatory... Talking about food and revolution and surveillance – could you get more ‘edge of collapse’?!
- And Tracey went to Crystal Palace Subway, hosted by the Friends of Crystal Palace Park. The subway is undergoing major renovation, has an interesting history and a bright future (thanks to the glass roof).
