AI & POLITICAL VIOLENCEBeyond Misuse: Artificial Intelligence, Grievance, and the Future Landscape of Political Violence
If we posit that AI is a whole-of-society transformative technology, then we can develop a theoretical account of how AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence: AI is reordering labor markets, institutional authority, and the relational worlds in which people live, generating preconditions for political violence independently of whether violent actors adopt the technology themselves.
Abstract: The scholarly literature on artificial intelligence and terrorism has organized itself around three questions: (1) how violent non-state actors currently misuse AI, (2) how that misuse may evolve, and (3) how AI can be applied to counterterrorism ends. Each treats AI as an instrument brought to bear on the problem of political violence. This article argues that the misuse frame, while analytically valuable, is incomplete. Extending Mauro Lubrano’s recent framework on anti-technology extremism to the specific case of AI as a whole-of-society transformative technology, the article develops a theoretical account of how AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence. It argues that AI is reordering labor markets, institutional authority, and the relational worlds in which people live, generating preconditions for political violence independently of whether violent actors adopt the technology themselves. These conditions are bound together by a cross-cutting mechanism: the accountability gap that arises when AI-mediated decisions distribute harm without clearly attributable human agents. It is this gap that distinguishes AI-generated grievance from earlier forms of technological grievance. The article develops a framework organized around three grievance domains: economic order, state and institutional power, and social and personal fabric, and it considers how violence arising from these grievances may materialize, including through targets and actor types that lie largely outside current counterterrorism monitoring.
Politically motivated violence has often accompanied transformative technological change. From the Luddite machine-breaking campaigns of 1811 to the Earth Liberation Front arsons of the 1990s and 2000s, from Theodore Kaczynski’s 17-year mail bombing campaign against computer scientists, geneticists, and airline executives to the Animal Liberation Front’s sustained attacks on university researchers, certain technologies have generated not only economic disruption but also organized and individual violence directed at the persons, institutions, and physical infrastructure deemed responsible for that disruption. These episodes share a recognizable structure: a technology perceived as producing concentrated harm, institutional channels perceived as closed to redress, and a set of targets rendered attributable by their visible role in that technology’s development or deployment. Artificial intelligence may be the most recent, and perhaps the most totalizing, entry in this sequence, and recent incidents suggest that the pattern may be beginning to recur.
