Consider a simple thought experiment. Imagine you’ve just read yet another headline about artificial intelligence replacing truck drivers, radiologists, customer service agents. You feel a shift in your chest; not quite panic, but something like it. The insecurity settles in. You find yourself doubting whether democratic institutions can really protect you from this. You start disengaging from political discussions about technology. You skip voting in local elections. Why bother if the system can’t save your job anyway?
Now here’s what’s genuinely unsettling: that shift might be happening to you based on something that isn’t really happening yet.
Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the University of Vienna have just published findings that suggest a troubling disconnect between AI’s actual impact on labour and what people believe that impact to be. Their work, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that widespread perceptions of AI as a job killer are actively corroding people’s faith in democracy (and doing so even though AI has barely touched the labour market). Worse still, the belief itself seems to trigger the damage, independent of any real economic change. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, except what’s being fulfilled isn’t the job losses; it’s the collapse of democratic participation.
The team began by asking a straightforward question: what do Europeans actually think about AI and jobs? They pulled data from 37,079 respondents across 38 countries, a snapshot of public opinion from 2021. The results were remarkably consistent. In most European countries, the prevailing view was that artificial intelligence destroys more jobs than it creates. How much more consistent? The average response was 3.16 on a 5-point scale, well above the neutral midpoint. “The actual impact of artificial intelligence on the labour market is still limited,” says Armin Granulo, from the LMU Munich School of Management. “Nevertheless, many people primarily perceive artificial intelligence as replacing human labour. This perception is remarkably stable and particularly widespread in economically developed countries.”
Think about that for a moment. The damage, such as it is, comes not from what’s happening but from what people believeis happening. And they believe it in the rich world, in the places we might assume would be most equipped to adapt to technological change.
But here’s where the research gets darker. Those perceptions didn’t just sit there in people’s heads like harmless misconceptions. They correlated with something measurable: lower satisfaction with democracy, less engagement in political discussions about technology, reduced participation in civic processes. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, though. So the researchers went further.
They ran experiments. In the UK, they showed 1,202 nationally representative participants one of two scenarios: either a future where AI eliminates more jobs than it creates, or one where it creates more jobs than it eliminates. Same people, same setup, just different framing. The results were stark. Those who imagined AI as a job killer reported significantly greater erosion of trust in democratic institutions. They expressed lower willingness to engage politically with future AI developments. The effect was large (what researchers call a “very large” effect size). In the US, a separate group of 1,200 respondents showed the same pattern. The belief triggered the response, regardless of political orientation or prior attitudes toward technology.