AI Breaks the Meritocracy

Artificial intelligence is poised to decouple career success from individual effort by embedding returns to productive tasks into capital and platforms, which can be owned or controlled and then scaled. That creates a self‑reinforcing top cohort that is wealthy both as high earners and as capital owners, reducing upward mobility for the rest. — If true, this reframes debates about inequality and labor policy: policies focused on education or skills will be insufficient if AI locks returns into capital ownership and high‑wage insiders.