The warning signs were there two decades ago—long before ChatGPT, long before anyone worried about a robot taking their job. Around 2005, something quietly shifted in the American labor market. College degrees kept multiplying. Good jobs did not.
“That’s just not something that we saw for 30 years before that,” Scheiber says. “It’s a pretty remarkable shift.”
What filled that gap—between expectation and reality—was frustration. And frustration, it turned out, was organizing.
“The thing that I found really striking,” Scheiber says, “is I would talk to people in very different industries, very different professions. And they all were like, ‘Right on‘ — they were right there with the auto workers, right there with the actors, right there with the writers.” He recalls a refrain from his sources that cut to the bone of a shifting identity: “I may be a doctor or I may be a tech worker, but I’m still a worker.”
“Downward mobility is incredibly radicalizing,” he says. “If you either grew up upper middle class and that’s no longer available to you, or you grew up with the promise of joining the upper middle class because you went to college like you were told to, and took out your loans. And now there’s no job that is available that enables you to come to the middle class. There are probably some more radicalizing forces in history, but not that many.”
In a decade, Scheiber suggests, the shift in class self-identification may be nearly complete. “A large majority of people are just going think of themselves as working class,” he says.
Yet he resists pure fatalism. The word he keeps returning to is agency. These college-educated workers, he argues, are formidable precisely because of what their education gave them—not a guaranteed career, but what one sociologist he quotes calls “class confidence,” the trained ability to figure things out, to navigate bureaucracies, to push for better terms. “Bad things happen to them, like happen to everybody,” Scheiber says, “but they don’t tend to take that lying down.”
“The Industrial Revolution was a hundred-year process,” Craig says. “The tech revolution was a 30-, 40-year process of going from paper to digital. We’re in an AI revolution that’s going to happen in 10 years. That’s the massive shift.”
At Outlander, Craig recently wrote a 10-year vision statement. Its fifth pillar stopped him cold as he drafted it: “We’re in a decade where we’re going to see the massive dislocation of creative talent,” he says. “Creative, brilliant people are going to wake up this decade and realize the jobs that they thought they were going to have—and the jobs they thought they could have—are gone.”
“I hope that this freedom of labor and this massive productivity lead to this second golden age,” Craig says, “where we realize as societies that we can actually spend money on the arts, storytelling, and the creativity that makes humans blossom. Then the hard sciences where we push the boundaries of space travel and minerals and resources. That is where I think we go.”
But he does not minimize the turbulence of the transition. “It’s not that we have the blue-collar being dislocated,” he says. “It’s the most creative, educated, smart part of our society that in this decade is going to realize they don’t have jobs.”
The human cost follows quickly. That same entrepreneur runs a 1,500-person company. He told Chadha that his 300-person implementation team could be reduced to 30 or 40 with AI. “They’re doing a layoff for about 300 engineers, man,” Chadha says. “Which is pretty sad.”
“I worry about the next three years,” he says plainly. “There’s going to be this tale of haves and have-nots that’s just going to thicken and create a lot of social tension.” He pauses. “I’ve taken some security measures at my house—things I never worried about.” He and his girlfriend have applied for European Union citizenship as a contingency. “I don’t think we’re ready for it.”
Pressed on whether he truly believes social unrest is possible in America, Chadha does not flinch. “I think there’s a 10%, 15% scenario that’s a little scary,” he says. “And I hope we don’t come to that. I’m not saying we will. But there’s some chance that it could get pretty tough in the next couple of years.”
He remains bullish on the technology itself and on India’s long-term trajectory. Westbridge has invested roughly $1 billion in eight or nine AI companies, nearly all of which are scaling rapidly. But he draws a sharp distinction between where wealth is being created and where pain will be felt first. “The U.S.—we are such an amazing, dynamic economy. Things move faster here than Europe, faster than India, faster than anywhere,” he says. “I think we’re kind of the front line of everything.”
All three men—a labor journalist, a defense-world venture capitalist, a globalist fund manager—are converging on the same conclusion from radically different vantage points: that AI is not the origin of this story, only its most dramatic chapter. The college bargain that a generation of Americans was sold (borrow money, earn a degree, join the middle class) has been quietly unraveling for 20 years. What’s coming next may simply be the part that everyone finally notices.
“We haven’t really seen the labor market impacts of AI yet,” Scheiber says. “A little bit in fields like software development, but beyond that, we haven’t really seen it. So it does feel like we may only be at the beginning of it.”
But even at a slower clock, the political consequences compound. “Even if we see the unemployment rate for recent college grads tick up a few tenths of a percentage point every year for five years,” he says, “that’s gonna be pretty destabilizing.”
Craig agrees and frames the challenge in terms of historical analogy. Past technological revolutions allowed generations to absorb the shock. This one compresses a century of change into a decade. “It used to be, you could mark change with graveyards,” he says. “But the scope of change and the speed of change is so massive now. That’s the crazy part. My kids and their kids, we’re all going to be together in the middle of this crazy shift.”
Chadha puts it most succinctly: the human and political systems built to absorb disruption were designed for a slower clock.
The question now—for policymakers, employers, investors, and the generation caught in the middle—is whether anyone can build new institutions fast enough to keep up with the machines.
