Carlota Perez — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The Pattern That Hides in Plain Sight Chapter 2: The Frenzy and What It Builds Chapter 3: The Death Cross and the Migration of Value Chapter 4: What the Turning Point Demands Chapter 5: Creative Destruction at the Speed of Inference Chapter 6: The Institutional Blueprints Chapter 7: Regulation Between Capture and Imagination Chapter 8: Education as the Foundation That Does Not Yet Exist Chapter 9: The Builder's Wager and the Collective Consequence Chapter 10: Whether Golden Ages Still Come Epilogue Back Cover
Carlota Perez Cover

Carlota Perez

On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Carlota Perez. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Carlota Perez's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

The crash is the part nobody wants to talk about.

Every conversation I have about AI goes the same way. The exhilaration comes first — the productivity numbers, the capability expansion, the things a single person can build now that used to require a team of twenty. Then someone mentions the trillion dollars that vanished from software companies in eight weeks, and the room gets quiet. Not because the number is unfamiliar. Because nobody has a framework for what it means.

Technological Revolutions Framework
Technological Revolutions Framework

I didn't either. I had the vertigo — the falling and flying I describe throughout You On AI. I had the pattern recognition of a builder who has watched technology cycles for thirty years. I had the gut sense that we were inside something historic. What I

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Carlota Perez — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 15 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Carlota Perez — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

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Joseph Schumpeter
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Carlota Perez — On AI
12 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Schumpeter
Schumpeter's creative destruction is the theoretical predecessor that Perez's framework extends — she adds the timing dimension his theory lacks, making the Schumpeter-Perez dialogue the book's central intellectual thread.
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
Keynes's insistence on the state's active role in managing economic transitions is the institutional-theory backbone behind Perez's turning-point framework — the New Deal institutions were Keynesian before they were Perezian.
Karl Polanyi
Karl Polanyi
Polanyi's great transformation — the double movement of market expansion and social protection — is the political-economy frame within which Perez's deployment-phase institutional argument makes most sense historically.
Mariana Mazzucato
Mariana Mazzucato
Mazzucato's argument for the entrepreneurial state and conditionality in public investment is the contemporary policy-design companion to Perez's turning-point institutional theory — both insist that public institutions must actively direct technological deployment.
William Lazonick
William Lazonick
Lazonick's quarterly-trap and financialization critique explains why deployment-phase institutions failed to materialize after the ICT installation phase — shareholder primacy redirected the surplus that should have funded the golden age's institutional construction.
Daron Acemoglu
Daron Acemoglu
Acemoglu's institutions-and-growth framework provides the comparative empirical evidence that inclusive versus extractive institutions determine whether technological revolutions produce broadly shared prosperity — the quantitative foundation beneath Perez's qualitative historical argument.
Erik Brynjolfsson
Erik Brynjolfsson
Brynjolfsson's productivity-paradox research tracks the lag between technology adoption and productivity gains that Perez's deployment-phase theory explains structurally — the gains don't arrive until the institutional infrastructure is built.
Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe
Mbembe's postcolonial analysis raises the structural objection that Perez's framework must absorb: previous golden ages were golden for the advanced economies while remaining extractive toward the rest — the AI golden age cannot repeat this pattern.
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler
Toffler's future shock captures the psychological dimension of rapid technological transition that Perez's structural analysis identifies but doesn't dwell on — the identity disruption and disorientation that accompanies every installation phase.
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
Bell's post-industrial society thesis anticipated the shift from manufacturing to knowledge work as the locus of economic value — the intellectual foundation beneath Perez's account of AI-driven creative destruction in cognitive rather than physical labor.
Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker
Drucker's concept of the knowledge worker and knowledge economy provides the institutional vocabulary for the class of workers most directly affected by AI-driven creative destruction — the management theorist who named what Perez says is being repriced.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Arendt's distinction between labor, work, and action illuminates the ontological challenge AI poses to knowledge workers — when AI absorbs the labor and work dimensions, what remains is action in the political sense, which Perez calls institutional imagination.

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