Societies must channel technological potential toward broad-based growth rather than allowing the gains to concentrate among the winners of the speculative phase. The market grasped this before the accountants did. Since early this year, the S&P 500 Software and Services Index has shed nearly $1 trillion. Salesforce is down 30 per cent year-to-date. Adobe’s forward price-earnings ratio has compressed from 30 to 12. Software price-to-sales ratios fell from nine to six within weeks, levels not seen since the mid-2010s. Australian superannuation funds, with hundreds of billions invested in international equities heavily weighted to US technology, are exposed to every dollar of this repricing. But software is only where the destruction is most visible. It is not where it ends. AI is beginning to erode the value of a broader category of accumulated capital: the knowledge, processes, organisational structures and professional expertise that the advanced economies spent half a century building.
