In October 1996, at the last party conference before the election that would make him British prime minister, Tony Blair tried to define the essence of New Labour. He started off by contrasting his party with the dying Conservative government, before summarising his three priorities for power. They were, in order, “education, education and education”. The applause was thunderous — and, unlike the applause in recent Labour gatherings, genuine.

The idea that “education is the best economic policy” was at the heart of the progressive bargain with the market. President Bill Clinton said that “the information age is, first and foremost, an education age”. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund insisted that education is the golden key to growth and inclusion. Universities enjoyed the longest period of expansion in their history as governments tried to make sure that half their young people graduated.

Well, here is the latest message on education from the corporate elite: take your sheepskin and shove it. Amazon.com Inc., one of the trendsetters of global business, recently announced that it is eliminating almost 10 per cent of its corporate workforce. Other companies that have decided to wield the axe include consultancies (Booz Allen Hamilton), carmakers (General Motors Co), retailers (Target Corp) and service companies (United Parcel Service Inc).

Graduates are entering the most challenging job market in years, with entry-level roles disappearing and summa cum laudes scrabbling for crumbs. Even newly minted economics PhDs no longer have a 100 per cent employment rate. Yet at the same time, opportunities for skilled blue-collar work are growing. Companies report shortages of workers in healthcare, hospitality and, more importantly, engineering and construction. Ford Motor Co chief executive Jim Farley noted, in a LinkedIn post in June on “the essential economy”, that the United States is short 600,000 factory workers and 500,000 construction workers, and will need 400,000 auto technicians in the next three years.

The reason for this asymmetry between white and blue-collar jobs is simple: the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. The technology is automating large swathes of cognitive work, starting with things that involved routine form filling and pattern recognition, and quickly moving up the value chain to include more creative tasks. But at the same time, an army of workers is needed to build the physical infrastructure of the new AI economy, the server farms and data centres and the like.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looks at the impact of technological innovation on labour demand over two centuries. The authors conclude that, hitherto, innovation has consistently increased demand for occupations with higher educational qualifications, higher pay and a larger proportion of female workers. By mechanising cognitive work, AI could be the first major technology to reverse that trend. The researchers project that, over the next decade, demand for high-education jobs will decline relative to mid-wage occupations by 0.59 per cent a year for managers, 0.29 per cent for professionals and 0.85 per cent for clerical jobs. Occupations with a larger share of female workers will contract by 0.53 per cent a year relative to male-dominated jobs.

The white-collar workers who do survive the jobs apocalypse are not likely to get off scot-free. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia Corp, predicts that the workforce of the future will consist of a combination of “digital humans” and “biological ones”, as companies spend trillions of dollars hiring, training and deploying digital nurses, accountants and marketers. The remaining white-collar workers will not only have to put up with being monitored and second-guessed by machines; they will also need to compete with “digital humans” who never suffer from fatigue, never have to deal with family problems and never demand a pay rise.

Yet a glance at history demonstrates that an alienated educated elite is social dynamite. There is no wrath like wrath of people who have seen their expectations of the good life dashed on the rocks of reality. And there is no group more dangerous than a group that possesses the ability to organise and agitate. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard University, even proffered a rule: the higher the level of education of the unemployed or alienated person, the more extreme the destabilising behaviour that results.

Both the French and the Russian revolutions were, as much as anything, the work of educated people who didn’t find a place in society equal to their expectations. Alexis de Tocqueville called the French Revolution a revolution of rising expectations. Voltaire claimed that “it was the books that did it all”. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky came from a long line of alienated Russian intellectuals who combined utopian dreams with a taste for terrorism.

Radicalism has not come only from the Left. The Nazi Party drew its cadres disproportionately from the educated bourgeoisie who had seen their wealth eroded by the great inflation of the early 1920s and who felt threatened by organised labour. Perhaps a quarter of German university professors were members of the Nazi Party, a higher proportion than in the general population. Heinrich Himmler’s elite SS division was disproportionately recruited from graduates and other educated professionals.

The pattern holds true for more recent revolutions. The Arab Spring was driven primarily by university graduates who found that their years of study were no help in getting secure jobs. And another spring, or perhaps autumn, may be in the offing: Over the past several months, frustrated young people led antigovernment protests in Indonesia, Nepal, Peru, Morocco and Madagascar.

Modern Western countries have much deeper lines of defence against disorder than 1930s Germany or 1780s France, of course. And as AI batters educated people as producers, it will benefit them consumers, slashing the cost of, say, preparing a will or doing your accounts. Yet the AI revolution is coming so fast that politicians don’t have time to understand it, let alone plan for its consequences. What was once a haven, a white-collar job, is increasingly looking like a house of cards, and what seemed like a sensible investment, a university education, may be money down a rat hole.

The past few decades have already seen a significant radicalisation of the educated class. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City reminds us that graduates have been rallying to left-wing candidates since the end of the Obama era. Less remarked upon is the way that a generation of educated men have been rallying to President Donald Trump: JD Vance likes to flaunt his book learning and Kevin Roberts, the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation, always puts PhD after his name.

The ideas that these radicals, both Left and Right, are flirting with are getting more extreme. And the intensity with which they hold them is becoming more marked. The AI revolution is adding fuel — and plenty of it — to an already raging fire.

• Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World