CONCEPT
Five Waves of Creative Destruction
Carlota Perez's enumeration of the five technological revolutions since 1771 — each following the same two-phase structure of installation and deployment — with the AI revolution emerging as the candidate sixth wave.
Perez identified five great technological revolutions in the history of industrial capitalism: the first Industrial Revolution (1771), the Age of Steam and Railways (1829), the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering (1875), the Age of Oil and Mass Production (1908), and the Age of Information and Telecommunications (1971). Each revolution deployed a new techno-economic paradigm that transformed the productive structure of the global economy. Each followed the same two-phase structure — installation driven by financial capital, deployment driven by production capital, separated by a turning point typically marked by crisis. AI, by this analysis, is the engine of a possible sixth wave, though whether it constitutes a genuinely new paradigm or a continuation of the ICT revolution remains contested.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Perez's framework extended Schumpeter's intuitive theory of waves into a systematic historical architecture. Her distinctive contribution was to specify the phase structure (installation/deployment) and to identify the institutional conditions under