PERSON
Jerry Kaplan
The Silicon Valley builder turned Stanford economist of automation—who split the coming machines into synthetic intellects and forged laborers, then asked the question every engineer forgot: who gets paid when the work is done by something that earns no wage?
Jerry Kaplan is the rarest kind of critic: a builder who has stood on both sides of the machine. Trained at Chicago and Penn in the history and philosophy of science before earning a doctorate in computer science, he co-founded Teknowledge in 1981—one of the first publicly traded AI companies—then helped invent the pen-based tablet at GO Corporation, launched an online auction platform before eBay existed, and later returned to Stanford to teach the history and philosophy of artificial intelligence. That biography gave him an immunity few commentators possess. His central insight, sharpened over decades, is almost embarrassingly plain: the danger of
automation is not that machines will wake up and rebel, but that they will work exactly as designed and quietly route the gains to whoever owns them. By dividing the coming machines into
synthetic intellects and forged laborers, Kaplan gave the field a vocabulary precise enough to think clearly about
who captures the