AI Backlash: Is This The Biggest Disruption Since The Industrial Revolution?

20th May 2026
What Are The Main Types Of AI? AI is everywhere all at once. The average AI user may only be familiar with generative AI – the ChatGPTs of this world – you input a question, AI spits out an answer, usually at incredible speed. Fast enough for the average human to reasonably ask how on Earth have you managed to read and analyse and respond to the question I just asked in only a second. And then there is the AI that you use without necessarily knowing it. Netflix recommends, Spotify recommends known as recommendation AI. Agentic AI – AI that can take actions on your behalf like answer emails. Predictive AI – AI that can assess risk, assess if you get paid out for an insurance claim. And the list goes on. It is becoming a bit like software in that it is already so deeply embedded in almost every aspect of our lives that much like a set of Christmas tree lights it’s already become impossible to untangle. Is AI The Biggest Disruption Since The Industrial Revolution? The former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently addressed the students from the University of Arizona. He spoke of the biggest disruption to society since the industrial revolution, only that this will happen at lightning speed and impact every aspect of society. Schmidt’s remarks were greeted with a round of boos from the graduating students. So, has the pushback against AI saturation already begun and if so can anything be done to stop it and equally even if we could control it should we? After all if the US doesn’t win the race for AI dominance surely China will ‘hold all the cards’ to paraphrase the current occupant of the White House. AI Job Losses Are No Longer A Future Fear The clear and present danger from AI is on the global workforce. Finance Monthly has reported on the issue of layoffs due to AI it’s almost becoming a daily occurrence – Standard Chartered, Meta, Coinbase to name but a few. According to recent research conducted by Goldman Sachs some 300 million jobs are globally exposed to AI automation. This does not mean 300 million job losses, but it does create huge disruption in the global workforce. So, it is easy to understand the anxiety around AI is building day by day. It’s easy to understand why Schmidt was booed and as a parent you may feel deeply anxious about what job opportunities will remain for your children when they leave school and university. One chilling example of this is coding just a few years ago many schools and universities were pushing hard for computer science and coding to be taken up by students, but even this is under attack from AI. Indeed, as someone who doesn’t have the first idea on how to code, I managed to build a simple run training app using Claude to do all the coding for me – it took about 5 minutes. Here’s the Catch-22 – more AI integration is leading to fewer jobs, fewer jobs means lower tax revenue and a higher welfare budget and not least fewer customers to spend their money with corporations. So, the economic picture and outlook will become distorted in that corporations will ‘grow’ not through more sales, more customers but they will be seen to grow by increasing profitability – at least in the near term. If company X turns over $100m per year and the biggest overhead is staff at $50m keeping things simple the company makes $50m profit per year. Slash staffing costs by 90% because of AI integration and automation the company now makes $95 million profit per year. In the short term Wall Street is extremely happy but the can that has been kicked down the road is waiting, looming and it’s not going anywhere. What if your customer base drops off a cliff and there aren’t enough jobs to go round, then who will buy the product? So, while the short-term looks rosy for corporations in terms of efficiency savings through AI the medium term is much less certain. The AI Arms Race Is Making Regulation Harder The counter to all this doom and gloom is of course that AI is a force for good it will be able to cure cancer it will solve global warming, it will solve world hunger. These lofty and noble ambitions would truly be life-changing in the most literal sense and no right-minded person would argue that achieving these goals would be nothing short of a miracle. There is no doubt the tech bros would say it’ll all be good. For them, absolutely. For the rest of us well that remains to be seen. The issue is what if there is no humanity left to save? What if low employment and low spending power undermines the very fabric of capitalism, what if civil unrest leads to warfare, what if AI warfare leads to a tipping point mistake involving global superpowers or even so-called middle powers. This is clearly a lot of what-ifs and a pessimistic view but as things stand there is scant regulation of AI as the US and China are locked in the AI arms race and neither nation wants to hamstring themselves with regulation and lose the race, coming second is for losers. Humanity is being asked to trust 4-5 people (in the US at least) the likes of Altman, Musk, Pichai, Zuckerberg, Amodei, to rule the world and the lives of almost everyone in the West. Should they be trusted? Does the public have any choice? Governments around the world are having to go full trust-mode and the public is being asked to accept the tsunami of disruption that is beginning to crash on Western shores right now. The truth is the average Joe is very much a passenger on the world’s fastest rocket to the Moon and there is currently no way of aborting the mission, it will take governments of the world working together for the greater good, such as the US and China, to have any kind of control of the AI rocket ship.