The One Percent Rule

What happens to a society when intelligence itself becomes a commodity? That is the question posed throughout the National Academy of Sciences 2025 report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. The work is not prophecy, nor should it be mistaken for one of Silicon Valley’s breathless manifestos. It is, rather, a sober, meticulous reckoning with the ambiguous, disquieting, and often paradoxical forces unleashed by the rise of AI. Strategic, unvarnished, and disturbingly persuasive.

The authors are not alarmists, but their findings demand our attention. The committee, featuring renowned researchers such as Erik Brynjolfsson, David Autor, Tom Mitchell, and others remind us that AI, as a general-purpose technology, joins the ranks of electricity and the steam engine, tools that did not merely make us faster but rewrote the coordinates of productivity.