Most of the shit going on right now can be explained by fatcats in the West, having run out of Economic growth to capture as the West's growth rate pretty much collapsed (quite possible due to the very actions those fatcats during the Neoliberal era, were amongst other things Social Mobility collapsed), have increasingly started pillaging the wealth and productive capacity of the rest of society, or in other words, exploiting everybody else.

It's a vicious cycle were the tightening of the screws on everybody else leads to lower productivity and higher discontent which in turn leads to further tightening of the screws on everybody else in order for the elites to keep on getting wealthier at the same rate.

AI was supposed to be a way for the fatcats to be able to extract even more wealth from the rest whist having less exposure to all those pesky natural human and societal responses to that.