This Industrial Revolution Is Not Like the Last One

The space-cum-artificial intelligence company Space X just went public at an eye-watering valuation—the largest in history—making its founder, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire. In the same stretch of days, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average American worker had lost a year and a half of wage gains as of May. Two more frontier labs, Anthropic and Open AI, are lined up to raise fortunes of their own, even as trust in the technology craters and anxieties about job losses and inequality climb.

Policymakers feel the pressure to prove they are not mere bystanders while a revolutionary technology threatens to upend the social order. Their instinctive response borrows from an earlier age, when automation came for the factory. That playbook never worked especially well: Since the 1980s, it failed to make displaced workers whole, and across the advanced world, its deployment coincided with rising inequality. And it is even less suited to what comes next.

The space-cum-artificial intelligence company SpaceX just went public at an eye-watering valuation—the largest in history—making its founder, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire. In the same stretch of days, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average American worker had lost a year and a half of wage gains as of May. Two more frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, are lined up to raise fortunes of their own, even as trust in the technology craters and anxieties about job losses and inequality climb.