The Revised Industrial State

The industrial state Galbraith described in 1967 was organized around the manufacture of physical goods — automobiles, appliances, chemicals, steel — through processes requiring enormous capital investment, specialized labor, and management systems complex enough to coordinate thousands of workers across continental supply chains. The industrial state emerging in 2026 is organized around a different form of production: the production of inferences. Large AI companies produce not physical goods but computational predictions — pattern completions, language generation, code synthesis — through processes requiring enormous capital investment (in compute rather than factories), specialized labor (in machine learning rather than metallurgy), and management systems complex enough to coordinate training, alignment, and deployment of models whose internal operations are not fully understood even by their builders. The parallels operate at the level of economic architecture rather than surface similarity.