We are living through the most consequential technology transition in at least a century. The kind of transition that reshapes how economies work, how power is distributed and how we all live our lives. Most people don’t see this happening, but they should.

And, more important, they should have a say in how the transition unfolds. 

When my wife and I had our second child last fall, I stepped away from Anthropic, the AI company I cofounded, assuming I knew the fast pace of artificial intelligence development in my bones.

And yet when I returned to work in January, the technology within my own company had changed in ways that made my head spin. New ways of working. New technical breakthroughs. And the hard-to-shake feeling that while our foot is on the threshold, the world is not ready for the change on the other side of the door. 

Simply put, the AI industry has an urgent problem of disclosure. We must do a better job of telling people about what we see coming so that we can work as a society to confront the changes ahead. 

With AI, the stakes of change are higher and faster

Stanford economists have found, for example, that since ChatGPT’s November 2022 release, young workers in the most AI-exposed jobs have experienced measurable drops in entry-level employment.

And yet AI is expected to compress decades of progress in medicine, in education, in economic growth, into years or months. Studies already show AI........

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