The economy isn't splitting because of AI. It's been splitting since 1973 — two years after Nixon took America off the gold standard, a full decade before the personal computer arrived. Every technology wave since has followed the same pattern. Productivity goes up. Workers get more efficient. And a larger share of that productivity goes to whoever owns the technology rather than whoever operates it.AI didn't create this. It's accelerating it.The labor share of American income has fallen from 70 cents of every dollar produced in 1947 to 53.8 cents today — the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started measuring it. The top 10% now drive nearly half of all consumer spending. Goldman Sachs individual-level data shows displaced workers suffer earnings losses that compound over a decade — delayed home purchases, lower marriage rates, real earnings growing nearly 10 percentage points less than workers who were never displaced.The aggregate story looks fine. The transition story isn't. And you are living in the transition.Every AI displacement report you've read is measuring the wrong thing. Exposure scores cannot tell you what actually happens to employment without price elasticity data we don't yet have. The spread between Goldman's 7% GDP boost projection and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu's sub-1% estimate is the difference between a productivity revolution and a historical footnote — and nobody, including the people building the technology, can tell you which one you're living through.What history does tell us is this: technology has never produced permanent mass unemployment. But the gains go to the aggregate and the costs land on specific people. The workers who adapted in every previous transition captured most of the value. The ones who didn't saw their earnings compress permanently.So the question isn't whether AI is taking jobs. The question is the same one that has determined outcomes through every technology wave for the last 50 years: do you have leverage, or are you the leverage?
It stopped growing because they saw how boomers were able to afford too much and were getting complacent and they noticed if over time they held little by little back they were creating a slave generation that won't have anything to leave for the next generation and the next is then dependent on the system that just takes and leaves them with nothing.