Wages have barely moved since the 1970s, even as productivity and profits have soared. With fewer places to put that money, investors have poured capital into real estate, driving housing values sky-high and pushing rents out of reach for many workers. Now the rise of AI promises to accelerate the trend, concentrating even more wealth in assets like housing while everyday people struggle with an ever-rising cost of living.

Generative AI is accelerating a shift in the economy by replacing skilled knowledge work with scalable automation—not because it's better, but because it's cheaper. This change reflects existing power structures and economic incentives, not technological inevitability. The core challenge is not technical performance but human decision-making: who controls the tools, what values they encode, and what kind of society we’re building around them.

The current wave of AI represents the largest impact on social and economic life since the Enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. That movement shaped the modern world, but left behind a path of destruction as livelihoods were uprooted and sacrificed in the name of progress. Now, as we are faced with changes of similar scale, we have the opportunity to learn from the lessons of the past in order to create world that benefits the majority of humankind.