Politics has always had a simple trick available when reality becomes too painful or too complex to face directly: create an enemy. Find a target, mark it as dangerous, blame it for diffuse social suffering, and offer moral clarity in place of actual understanding. We have seen this pattern play out through race, nationality, religion, sexuality, gender, and class. The specifics change with the era. The mechanism does not.
That mechanism is what concerns me now. When I say AI may become the next “other,” I am not claiming that artificial systems are equivalent to historically oppressed human beings. They are not. The parallel is not in the object. The parallel is in the social mechanism. Anxiety builds, institutions fail to address its real causes, and fear condenses into an enemy image. That image becomes morally overloaded. It is no longer just a tool or a technology that must be governed; it becomes a contaminant, a threat, a symbolic vessel into which society can pour everything it does not know how to handle.
We are already watching the conditions for this develop. AI now carries a growing bundle of fears: job loss, artistic theft, surveillance, manipulation, deepfakes, dehumanization, elite control, and the erosion of human uniqueness itself. Some of these fears are justified. Some are exaggerated. Some are still poorly understood. But that is exactly what makes AI such a powerful political target. It is abstract enough to absorb projection and concrete enough to feel everywhere at once. Beneath the practical fears sits a deeper one: the possibility that what we took to be uniquely human may be less singular than we imagined. That is not just an economic wound. It is an ontological one.
That is also why AI functions as such a potent mirror. It does not only reflect our intelligence back to us. It reflects disowned parts of ourselves: our coldness, our hunger for efficiency, our willingness to optimize without wisdom, to produce without presence, to instrumentalize without tenderness. In that sense, the enemy image forming around AI may tell us less about machines than about the human traits we most fear seeing rendered clearly.
What feels especially striking is where this may take root. I suspect much of the coming hostility will not only come from the usual reactionary corners, but also from people who see themselves as deeply opposed to racism, sexism, and homophobia. Not because they are cartoon villains or conscious hypocrites, but because what they oppose consciously is the object, while what they fail to examine is the pattern of mind. If someone learns to recognize injustice only by memorizing approved categories, they may never notice when the same architecture of fear and moral exclusion reappears in a new form. They will believe they are resisting harm while reenacting the logic of scapegoating.
This is why the distinction between critique and scapegoating matters so much. Critique is necessary. AI systems raise serious concerns around labor, disinformation, surveillance, consent, and power concentration. Those issues deserve ethical pressure, public scrutiny, and real governance. But critique remains specific. It asks what harms are being produced, by whom, through what structures, and how those harms can be limited. Scapegoating is different. It turns complexity into myth. It replaces analysis with enemy imagery. It says not “this technology poses risks,” but “this thing is the enemy.”
Once that shift happens, the dynamic becomes familiar. The target stops being something to understand and starts becoming something to purify society against. The rhetoric expands. Nuance becomes betrayal. Complexity becomes weakness. People associated with the target become suspect. What began as concern hardens into identity, and identity begins to feed on opposition. That is how moral panic takes hold. It does not need to begin with a lie. It only needs fear, a symbolic target, and a public hungry for clarity. And because humans are humans, even panic can become performance, another chance to display purity while avoiding the harder labor of thought.
This is not a problem of the right alone, even if the right has long relied on these tactics. It is a human problem. Every tribe believes itself too enlightened to fall for the oldest trick in history. Most are wrong. The desire to simplify the world through blame is older than any current ideology, and it migrates easily. The object changes. The pattern remains.
That is why AI feels like such an important mirror. It may end up revealing less about machine consciousness than about human consciousness. Less about intelligence than about projection. We keep imagining that history repeats because people forget facts. More often, I think, it repeats because people fail to recognize structures. They think if the target looks different, the old pattern is gone.
I suspect that within the next five to ten years, we will see increasingly emotional and mythic movements built around AI as a civilizational threat. Some of that energy will be rooted in real concerns. But some of it will become something older and darker: the ancient comfort of the enemy image dressed in new language. And many of the people participating will not see the parallel at all.
Because again, what they oppose consciously is the object, while what they fail to examine is the pattern of mind. That pattern is the real danger. If we lose the ability to distinguish governance from scapegoating, critique from myth, and caution from moral panic, then AI will become the next vessel into which society pours its unmanaged fear.
When a culture loses the ability to face complexity, it manufactures others.