Anger is erupting across the world, as workers spill on to the streets to protest against everything from corruption and wealth inequality to pervasive joblessness. Meanwhile, the US is in the grip of an artificial intelligence investment gold rush predicated on replacing more human work with machines.
Demonstrations have spread like wildfire over the past year, in countries from Peru to Bangladesh and Indonesia. Each movement is driven by a particular resentment. In Nepal, protests escalated when the state banned social media — toppling prime minister KP Sharma Oli’s government in September.
In Indonesia, deadly riots erupted when politicians awarded themselves new perks amid a cost of living crisis. And in Madagascar, fury about power and water shortages led to the ousting of President Andry Rajoelina in a coup orchestrated by an elite military unit.
In richer Western states anger is — for now — visible through the lens of political fracture, with far right, and sometimes far left, movements surging, leading to gridlock in France.
It is easy to characterise the unrest as youth-driven — but that is simplistic. “This isn’t a Gen Z-specific thing,” said Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka. “This is what happens when people are not listened to, are marginalised and demonised. It’s what you get when people are at the end of their tether.”
Nevertheless, young people are at the sharp end. In the World Bank’s 2025 annual report, its president Ajay Banga wrote: “In the next decade, 1.2bn young people will enter the workforce in developing countries — but in those same countries, only 400m jobs” will be created. “That leaves 800m young people without a clear path to opportunity.”
Seeking work
If there is a unifying root cause of all the anger, it is the shortage of stable, well paid employment. In some parts of the economy, jobs have been eroded by globalisation, a process that was aggravated by Covid. Now there is a new, super-charged threat: the rapid onset of artificial intelligence.
AI was on everyone’s lips this week in Washington. “Listening to Kristalina [Georgieva]’s speech and some of the things Ajay said: these are the AI meetings,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director at the GeoEconomics Center, Atlantic Council.
Evangelists — including those invested in it — argue AI will bring huge productivity gains and economic benefits.
Ronald O’Hanley, chairman and CEO of State Street, said at an Institute of International Finance panel on Friday that while productivity gains have yet to materialise, “we’re just scratching the surface. I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic to say that we will see, at an increasing rate, a lot of impact there.”
But the technology is unprecedented and developing at incredible speed, with minimal governance.
“I think in AI, there’s this huge compartmentalisation,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, at the IIF on Friday. “The good news is fantastic. The bad is that the huge disruptions and dislocations are going to leave so many people unemployed. You’re going to have an entire generation that went through Covid, coming out of college, not able to get jobs.”
Marieke Blom, chief economist at ING, told GlobalMarkets she believes AI is having “a much more gradual effect on employment, for two reasons.”
“One, it takes time for companies to start to make use of it, and for it to have an effect on employment, that’s a slow process,” she said. “The technology is faster than the process within organisations.”
“Two, there’s a lot of new work being created via AI. I think there may be job losses in some place but there are going to be additional opportunities elsewhere. Net-net I don’t think we’ll see much higher unemployment because of AI.”
Big and small
Asked in a civil society townhall meeting on Tuesday how AI could bring more jobs in developing countries, Banga said: “Everybody is talking about Big AI — ChatGPT, that kind of stuff. What does it need to be successful? Computing power — lots of it. Electricity — lots of it. Data — lots of it. And people who understand how to use it — many of them. Tell me how many EM countries have these four and I’ll give you a medal. So be careful with the idea that Big AI will somehow allow a developing country to leapfrog.”
He added: “You have to figure out how to enable that Big AI to be useful to a developing country. I’m not certain it’s completely clear.”
Anshula Kant, chief financial officer of the World Bank Group, went further. “It can take away jobs,” she warned. This could cause rifts between the “haves and the have-nots” — rich and poor, urban and rural, men and women. “It is a cause of worry,” Kant said, “that further technology and advancement in AI can exacerbate this divide.”
Banga did praise the potential of ‘small AI’ — “tools that can be used on your phone, so computing power etc is much more local and manageable. If I’m a farmer in a cooperative in Uttar Pradesh in India or Kenya or Brazil and I can point my phone to a disease on a crop, and the AI tells me it’s equal to that insecticide, for $3, that’s priceless. That’s small AI at work.”
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said at a press briefing on Friday: “We don’t want AI to turn into yet another vehicle for divergence. We would like it to help the process of convergence.” The IMF sees “a little bit of hope,” she said. “There is a recognition in many developing economies that they need to move fast so they can leapfrog with AI.”
She pointed to how this had happened with mobile banking and payments.
“My advice to low-income countries and developing economies,” Georgieva said, “is to eliminate first and foremost the technical obstacles. If you don’t have access to electricity, access to the internet, you cannot be part of the AI revolution.”
She added: “It is an advantage to build data centres, and all things being equal, it is an advantage to have cheap energy. But it is not prohibitive if you don’t have this. What will be prohibitive is not having a strategy on how to make AI work for everyone.”
Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia’s minister of finance, said “I think human capital is as important for AI as energy. You shouldn’t underestimate that if you have [human capital], then you don’t need data centres in your country. You can tap data centres wherever they are. Africa and a lot of low income countries could have what it takes, if they focus on recalibrating their education system.”
Need for action
Meanwhile, in Indonesia for instance, ‘old economy’ jobs are disappearing, to be replaced by gig work that means long hours, low pay and a glaring lack of economic security.
“The jobs under greatest threat there are those held by lower income workers,” said Cogan.
The deepening jobs crisis is not limited to low income states with weaker institutions. One in five Chinese youths is unemployed, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
In the WBG annual report Banga said: “By 2050, 80% of the world’s population will live in countries currently considered developing. We cannot afford to wait. The most expensive word in development is ‘later’.”
The pressure is on governments and multilateral organisations to engineer solutions to these towering problems. If they cannot, like so many once stable jobs — toll collectors, switchboard operators, data entry clerks — they too risk being swept away.
AI is indiscriminate — it will affect countries of all income levels.
“This is the maturation of globalisation,” said Cogan. “It isn’t an issue of jobs moving abroad any more — it’s the very nature of job creation. Jobs are not being outsourced but replaced by robots and AI. This transformation will increase economic anxiety — not just among the young, but everybody.”
Additional reporting by Jon Hay, Phil Thornton