The path to a potential "age of abundance" will fracture along existing geopolitical lines, with capitalist societies like the United States facing the severest disruption. Without mechanisms to rapidly redistribute AI's productivity gains, market-driven economies will experience waves of unemployment as entire categories of white-collar and service work evaporate. The displaced won't simply retrain—many will face permanent economic marginalization. This joblessness will fuel mounting social breakdown: rising crime as legitimate economic pathways close, urban decay in former employment centers, and escalating violence as communities fracture under economic strain. Meanwhile, those who control AI capital will capture astronomical returns, creating a wealth gap so vast it destabilizes the social fabric entirely. Traditional Western democracies, built on assumptions of broadly shared prosperity and upward mobility, may find their political institutions unable to contain the resulting rage.

Social democracies face a different but equally grim trajectory. Their generous welfare systems, designed for manageable unemployment levels, will buckle under the fiscal weight of supporting displaced majorities. As tax bases erode and dependency ratios explode, these nations will face impossible choices: slash benefits and trigger unrest, or print money and court hyperinflation. The likely result is a gradual slide toward authoritarianism as desperate populations trade freedom for economic security. What begins as emergency measures—price controls, capital restrictions, state seizure of AI infrastructure—calcifies into permanent command economies. Former bastions of Nordic prosperity may find themselves resembling command economies of the past, marked by scarcity, rationing, and political repression, as they struggle to manage resources they can no longer efficiently allocate.

China, by contrast, enters this transition with structural advantages that could prove decisive. Centralized control over capital deployment means the state can direct AI investment toward national priorities rather than allowing returns to concentrate in private hands. Party control over wealth distribution enables rapid reallocation—displaced workers can be moved, retrained, or supported through state apparatus without waiting for market corrections or democratic consensus. China's lead in AI development, manufacturing capacity, and digital infrastructure positions it to capture global market share as Western competitors fracture internally. While democratic societies debate and deliberate, Chinese planners can act with speed and scale. The result could be a dramatic power shift where China emerges from the transition as the world's dominant economic and technological force, having turned AI disruption into strategic advantage.

The developing world, meanwhile, will largely sit out this transformation. Most third-world nations lack the capital to acquire advanced AI systems, the infrastructure to deploy them at scale, and the educated workforce to operate them. They'll watch as wealthy nations tear themselves apart over AI's spoils while remaining locked in pre-AI economic models. This could prove paradoxically stabilizing—absent the technology, they avoid the disruption. Yet it also means permanent marginalization, as the productivity gap between AI-enabled and AI-excluded economies grows insurmountable. The global order that emerges may resemble a new kind of colonialism: a technologically advanced core extracting resources and data from a permanently backward periphery, with the barrier to entry no longer gunboats but computational power and algorithmic sophistication that poor nations can never hope to acquire.