The Age of AI Anxiety — and the Hope of Democratic Resistance

In 2023, leading artificial intelligence researchers and executives called for a six-month pause on advanced model training, warning of “profound risks to society and humanity.” Governments around the world responded with summits, statements and frameworks — but little in the way of enforceable actions. Since then, frontier labs have released ever-larger models, chipmakers like Nvidia have broken valuation records and AI has permeated nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from customer service to services that help students cheat in school and mental-health apps. The White House’s AI Action Plan, while comprehensive in scope and encouraging in affirming United States leadership in AI development and deployment, reinforced the accelerationist trajectory: speed first, safeguards later. Amid the frenzy, one sentiment has crystallized across the public sphere: anxiety.

Unlike past waves of technological revolution, AI anxiety fuses economic insecurity, technical opacity and political disillusionment. AI-enabled automation is threatening jobs for white-collar workers and recent graduates, with layoffs and slow job growth happening at the same time as record corporate profits, eroding faith in the promise of shared prosperity. The technical “black box” problem — developers’ inability to explain or control model behavior — deepens that unease, especially as AI systems get integrated into decision-making, creative production, and interpersonal intimacy.

The storm center is further spiraled by a broader societal collapse of trust. Institutions long tasked with producing and disseminating knowledge — government, science, media — now face historic polarization and skepticism. Social platforms that once promised empowerment devolved into cycles of “enshittification”: declining quality, rising exploitation and algorithmic opacity. AI integration into business processes risks worsening this dynamic, outsourcing judgment without accountability. From the seemingly banal frustration with algorithmic error to corporate evasion that compounds workplace and consumer grievances, the public is forced to reckon with a transformational and disruptive technology — often without their consent and consultation.