CONCEPT
The Information Age's Incomplete Deployment
Perez's thesis that the ICT revolution's deployment phase never fully arrived — leaving AI to inherit a society with weaker institutional infrastructure than any previous turning point has required.
The information and telecommunications revolution that irrupted in 1971 should, following Perez's pattern, have entered a deployment phase after its turning point — the dot-com crash of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008. It did not. The gains of the digital revolution remained concentrated among platform companies and their shareholders. The institutional innovations that every previous golden age required — educational reform, labor market restructuring, modernized social insurance, governance frameworks adequate to the new paradigm — were delayed, diluted, or blocked by political dynamics that Perez had been warning about since the early 2000s. The deployment phase was not realized. AI has arrived into the resulting institutional vacuum.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The evidence of incomplete deployment is visible across every dimension of contemporary life. Educational institutions designed for the information age are training students in skills that AI commoditizes faster than students can acquire them. Labor market protections designed for the industrial employment relationship