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…