AI didn’t start in 2022. The question isn’t which Fortune 500 company uses the machine — they all do; you don’t reach that list without absorbing it. So the capital line is the absorption curve. Since 1950, as each wave of automation got absorbed — UNIVAC, Disney & IBM at the ’64 World’s Fair, the PC, the web, the phone, the model — capital’s share of the economy rose and labor’s fell. The gap is the machine.
Both lines start together at 1950. Up is a rising share of the whole economy; down is a falling one. The widening wedge between them is each decade’s automation, absorbed. Hover any marker for the wave it names.
The story is usually dated to ChatGPT. It should be dated to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. There, Disney’s four sponsored attractions were WED/Imagineering’s real R&D lab for systematizing the body — Audio-Animatronics, crowd throughput, the controlled ride-path — every one later moved into the for-profit parks. Beside it, the IBM pavilion was the R&D lab for systematizing the mind: the decision-automation half, in the System/360 era.
Two labs for the same project, a generation before anyone called it AI. Everything after — the PC, the web, the phone, the model — runs down the line that starts there. The market simply kept score of who absorbed it.