Will AI do to expert professions what the Model T did to railroads?

As economist Carlota Perez so eloquently lays out, systemic changes in technologies always lead to systemic changes in society. The winners in an old regime become the losers in a new one. With many predicting that the AI revolution will democratize access to expertise, what changes might we expect?

Taken-for-granted assumptions and how societies are organized

Technological advances make the formerly impossible possible, sparks excitement when their potential is realized and then come to be taken as utterly ordinary. By the time technologies have become so diffused that they are part of daily life, they will completely rewire the societies in which they are commercialized.

Railroads, for instance, with their ability to transport goods at previously unprecedentedly low rates made the canal-and-turnpike system that preceded them obsolete and gave rise to robber barons and steel magnates.

This is the thesis of many economists who study long cycles of development in capitalism, famously Joseph Schumpeter and more recently Carlota Perez. Schumpeter put the technological entrepreneur at the center of his theories of economic change, noting that each successive “wave of creative destruction,” as he put it, rendered obsolete many of the solutions from a previous era.

Carlota Perez builds on Schumpeter’s idea by arguing that the booms and busts of capitalism are a feature, not a bug. Lured into exciting new technologies by their promise of great riches, capitalists flood the new sectors with money and encourage entrepreneurs to break down the old systems and create something new. Eventually, as the new technologies are more widely adopted, societies change to reflect the new economics of what is now possible. Winners in the old regime become losers in the new one and resist it. Eventually capital comes back into the “production economy” and what was once considered an impossible fantasy becomes ordinary reality.

The Model T and mass production

Consider the world in 1900. One got around on foot, by horse or by using a railroad or steam ship. The first immense modern corporations grew up, fueled by railroad and steel monopolies. The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and…