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AI, Robotics and the Coming Economic, Military, and Political Revolutions

In the context of ongoing transformations to the economy, society, and military, China’s current strategy is particularly alarming, and potentially transformational.

A humanoid service robot as a cashier in an automated convenience store selling drinks in Shanghai, China, Nov. 28, 2025.

As China’s President Xi Jinping prepares to travel to Washington, D.C. on September 24, his approach will reflect not only the specific items on his agenda, but also broader geopolitical transformations currently underway. These revolutions-in-progress create both enormous opportunities for China and hazards for it, and the international community, to navigate.

Reinforcing advances currently underway in “big data,” artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, and robotics are rapidly transforming both economic and military dynamics, with radical implications for political systems and the global balance of power. Latin America and the rest of the developing world will be a battleground, a beneficiary, and a victim in that enormous and chaotic change.  

Although the future cannot be predicted with certainty, one reasonable outcome of the current confluence of trends is a world that is far more violent, less democratic, and more dominated by China. That future could emerge more rapidly than most traditional analysts expect. Here’s how such traumatic and revolutionary change could occur, and what it could mean for the United States, Latin America, and the world.

The Coming AI-Robotics Revolution

Within the next decade, developments arising out of the synergy between artificial intelligence and robotics will likely present non-human alternatives to a wide variety of both white-collar and blue-collar, skilled and unskilled labor, transforming a far broader range of work, far more rapidly than occurred in last century’s industrial revolution. The amortized cost of industrial robots is already less in many cases than employing a human to do the task.  

Mass-produced Chinese robots from companies like Unitree and UBTech can be ordered for as little as $5,000, with many industrial capable units costing only $20,000-$50,000. At that price, such a robot, capable of replacing three shifts of factory workers, costs only a few months of the human wages its use would save. As with personal computers in the 1990s, those costs will only come down, and the sophistication of hardware, firmware, and AI-powered “control” mechanisms will only improve, as robotic systems are deployed at scale in an increasingly broad range of tasks.

What makes the current revolution even more transformational is that increasingly capable AI tools, whether virtual or embodied, have the capability to replace humans not only in factory work, but also in domestic and service work, as well as white collar tasks. This is particularly the case in technical areas, such as computer programming, legal work, medical technicians, and administrative support staff, among others. It is highly likely, as Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has said, that the nature of work will change from human beings doing things to directing and supervising AI and robotic systems in such tasks.  

Yet it is highly unlikely that the number of “supervisory” jobs created in the new AI-robotic economy, combined with new kinds of work supporting or complementing that economy, will fully offset those human jobs rendered economically non-competitive. The World Economic Forum estimates that current developments could displace 92 million jobs by 2030 alone. Moreover, the speed of the onset of the new tech economy, and the inherent difficulty of human beings adapting to new types of skills in new places, will significantly and rapidly expand what 19th century philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus once chillingly referred to as a “redundant population.”

As with the industrial revolution, the AI-robotics revolution will also likely expand socioeconomic inequality between those owning, implementing, and managing the structures of the new AI-robotics economy, and those whose jobs are replaced, or sectors whose wages are decreased, by competition with new AI and robotic alternatives. Those effects will be particularly acute among populations already increasingly discontent with democratic political systems’ dysfunction and inability to address contemporary challenges.

The responses of different political systems to such pressures will likely reflect a combination of two impulses: compensation and repression. Some governments will create or expand social “safety nets” to retrain, relocate, or at least mitigate the suffering of those displaced. Other governments – or in some cases, the same ones – will use instruments of state repression against those who react to the stresses caused by such economic displacement through descent into common criminality, or alternatively, violent protest and terrorism. Ironically, the tools for monitoring and controlling population’s movements, finances, and other aspects of their livelihood are also being greatly strengthened by advances in AI, access to “big data,” and other technologies. 

As AI puts significant pressures on democratic political systems and market economies, it will also play an ever-more-important role in the distribution, and ultimately, allocation, of resources for populations. Even today, AI is being used in operational management and logistics for both firms and governments. AI could actually mitigate some of the distortions and inefficiencies historically associated with government-led economic systems, most eloquently argued in 1945 by Friedrick Hayek. AI may thus help China and other authoritarian governments outcompete democratic free market systems by helping their performance, as well as their repressive capabilities, even as technology disruption dramatically expands stresses on democracies and market-based systems.

In tandem with such economic and political transformation, the aforementioned technology advances are also accelerating a revolution in military affairs. AI-enabled autonomous systems will increasingly replace manned ones in the air, on and under the ground, and in and under the water. They will be increasingly coordinated by AI-enabled battle and logistics management systems, whose ability to rapidly identify patterns and consider the outcome of numerous response scenarios will give them significant advantages over “human-in the loop” systems.  

At the same time, the new technologies will give middle powers, small states, and even resource-rich non-state criminal and terrorist groups the ability to defy and extort much larger actors, as Iran has done to the United........

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