Every long wave in economic history has been named after a machine. Steam. Rail. Electricity. Oil and the car. The microchip. The sixth wave is AI, robotics, genetics, nano, quantum, etc. Pick your favourite. I think they are all wrong. Not about the technology. About the wave. The next big wave is not technological. It is soft. It is social.
Every golden age was a social invention
Economic history shows that every technological revolution comes in two halves. First, the installation period: frenzy, bubbles, money pouring into the new infrastructure. Then a crash and a turning point. Then the deployment period: the golden age. Here is the part most technologists skip. The golden age is never unlocked by more technology. It is unlocked by social and institutional innovation. The post-war boom did not come from better engines. It came from the welfare state, mass home ownership, collective bargaining, and a new social contract. Nobody calls the 1950s and 60s “the oil wave”. We call it the consumer society. Suburbia. The welfare state. The value was social. Technology was the fuel. Society was the wave.
The turning point is here
Look at what is happening. The technology is installed, arguably over-installed. Data centres, platforms, models, IoT, sensors. Meanwhile, young people across Europe are protesting. Housing is out of reach, wages have stagnated since 2008, and public services are buckling. I wrote recently about the fiscal breaking point: years of decision debt, and a bill that is coming back to business. That is what a turning point looks like. The machines have moved on. The social settlement has not. The next wave is not the next technology. It is the next settlement.
Human health
It is health in the broadest sense: physical, mental, and social. And the biggest drag on growth is social disorder. The losses from dysfunction, distrust, isolation, and conflict. The bottleneck of the next economy is human.
Cheap intelligence
Every wave has a cheap key input. Cheap steel. Cheap oil. Cheap chips. This time, the key input is cheap intelligence. AI is to this wave what oil was to the last. But the input is not the wave. Oil did not create value by being oil. It created value through what society built on top of it. Cheap intelligence will be the same. The value will not sit in the model. It will sit in what we redesign around it: how we work, care, learn, decide, belong, and trust. The companies preparing for “the AI wave” are preparing for the installation phase that is ending. They are optimising for the fuel, not the age.
The social lag
Economists distinguish physical technologies from social technologies. Social technologies are inventions too, and they are the ones that turn capability into prosperity. They also lag. Physical technology races ahead. Social technology catches up later, usually after a crisis. We are living in that lag. You see it in every boardroom. Most AI programmes do not stall on technology. They stall on trust, permission, fear, status, and incentives. Your AI problem is a social problem. The next breakthroughs will be social inventions: new ways to coordinate, new decision rights, new forms of ownership and participation, new ways to prove that something is human, and new settlements between business, government, and the next generation.
Soft is not weak
Leaders hear “soft” and think “nice to have”. That is the industrial reflex. Soft is not the opposite of strong. For example, a tendon is soft and immensely strong. Soft means adaptive, relational, able to bend under pressure without breaking. The industrial age made the world hard, so machines could handle it. The next age is about making systems soft enough to handle the world. And soft is about to get very hard on the balance sheet.
Soft costs are becoming hard costs
For decades, the social was an externality. Off the balance sheet. Someone else’s problem. That is ending. AI makes value chains transparent. Fiscal pressure makes governments look for new money. Put the two together, and social harm becomes traceable, attributable, and billable: poor employment practices, addictive products, unhealthy food, and community damage. But there is an asymmetry, and it is the heart of the soft wave. AI can measure harm. It cannot manufacture trust. You will be billed precisely for the social damage you do. You cannot buy your way into the social value you need. Belonging, loyalty, legitimacy, and goodwill have to be earned, slowly, by people, in relationships.
The wave you cannot download
Everything that scales cheaply gets copied cheaply. Models, code, analysis, and content. That is the point of cheap intelligence. What does not scale cheaply: trust, purpose, care, meaning, and authenticity. Those are built slowly, between people. That is exactly why they will be the source of value in the next wave. Every wave so far has been named after a machine. The next one will not be. Stop asking which technology will win. Start asking which relationships will hold.
That is the thread running through my book STOP PREDICTING: 13 lessons from 1,400 attempts to see what was coming. The big shift is rarely the technology everyone is staring at. It is what moves underneath it.
