History's Most Revolutionary Innovation

In History's Most Revolutionary Innovation, Victor Menaldo shows that America's AI dominance was not an accident of entrepreneurial culture or free markets. It was engineered - through four decades of bipartisan reforms to intellectual property, antitrust, telecommunications, and trade policy that quietly built the legal and economic scaffolding the digital economy required. Situating AI within the lineage of previous general purpose technologies like steam engines, electricity, and the microchip, and tracing its full arc from semiconductors to smartphones to large language models, Menaldo shows how a handful of dominant firms simultaneously captured outsized returns and spread innovation across global supply chains - and asks what happens now that the US, China, and the EU are retreating into competing, gated technology regimes. The result is the first comprehensive account of where AI came from, why its benefits have been uneven, and what will determine whether the AI revolution lifts living standards.