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The funny thing about American capitalism is that it requires abundance to truly thrive, and yet capitalists prefer the illusion of exclusivity and scarcity to control the market.

It wasn’t too long ago when the Great Recession exposed the phrase “free market” as a synonym for “less accountability.” We also learned then that “job creators” just means “rich people,” and there was some truth to that back when labor was a necessary ingredient to building wealth. One way that the rich became richer was indeed by employing people to do things. In the age of AI, the richest among us are rapidly building wealth without labor, sometimes displacing it altogether.

What is slowly unfolding may feel like science fiction because many Americans alive today grew up when talk of extinction-level technology was entertainment — think “Terminator” of the 1980s, “Matrix” of the 1990s, “I, Robot” of the early 2000s. But now that we’re experiencing that point in the classic movie arc when the science community comes together to warn humanity of the dangers, we can easily see who failed to learn from fiction about the consequences of poorly regulated industries. History and Hollywood both teach us that when you allow capitalists to dictate the terms, the people will always be secondary to profits. The........

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