As AI wealth concentrates in Silicon Valley, California faces a vital choice between greed and ethics.
California has faced this moment before. A century ago, the industrial revolution transformed the East Bay and greater Bay Area into one of America’s great engines of wealth.
Oakland’s port bustled. Richmond’s shipyards roared. Factories spread across the region. Fortunes exploded, but so did suffering.
Workers endured dangerous conditions, poverty wages and widening inequality while industrial barons amassed extraordinary power. The marketplace did not correct those excesses. Moral intervention did. Labor unions, reformers, churches and ordinary citizens pushed back against an economic system that treated human beings as expendable.
In Oakland, 80 years ago this year, that resistance culminated in a historic General Strike. Thousands of workers shut down the city in solidarity against abuses of power.
Meanwhile, a different kind of intervention was underway from Oakland-based industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who had grown up witnessing the inequities of the industrial age. During World War II, while building ships in Richmond at unprecedented speed, Kaiser believed workers could not simply be treated as parts in a machine. He partnered with labor unions, offered pensions, integrated his workforce, welcomed women into wartime industry and pioneered prepaid nonprofit health care for his workers.
Most importantly, Kaiser went on national radio and warned that democracy itself could not survive if America returned to the greed, monopoly and economic cruelty that had scarred the industrial age. He believed the nation’s future depended upon broadly shared prosperity and human dignity. Once again, extraordinary wealth is concentrating into fewer hands while technology races ahead faster than society’s moral conscience. This time the engine is artificial intelligence and the staggering fortunes flowing from Silicon Valley.
Now it is Pope Leo XIV warning about the moral dangers of unchecked AI development. California is also debating a proposed billionaire tax that raises a related question: What obligations do the winners of this new economy owe to the society from which their fortunes emerge? Neither opposes innovation nor punishes success. Both recognize what history repeatedly teaches: When wealth and power become too concentrated, ordinary human beings get crushed.
California now contains some of the richest human beings in world history alongside tent encampments, overwhelmed food banks and working families struggling to survive in the very communities they help build. This is not a sign of healthy prosperity. It is a warning flare. For decades, Silicon Valley has celebrated Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous mantra: “move fast and break things.
” Well, many things have been broken, among them housing affordability, economic stability, privacy and increasingly the dignity and security of work itself. The billionaire tax and Pope Leo XIV’s call for ethical guardrails around artificial intelligence are both asking the same fundamental question: Does democracy still possess the courage to place human dignity ahead of raw profit and technological disruption?
History shows democratic societies periodically require moral correction when economic systems begin injuring people faster than institutions can protect them. From the wreckage of the industrial revolution came labor protections, Social Security, Medicare and worker health benefits because citizens demanded intervention against unchecked economic power. Artificial intelligence promises extraordinary gains in productivity and wealth. But without ethical restraint and civic responsibility, it also threatens deeper inequality, concentrated power and growing insecurity for ordinary people whose lives already feel precarious.
A civilized society does not measure success solely by the number of billionaires it creates. It measures success by whether ordinary people can still live with dignity, security and hope. Tom Debley is a retired East Bay journalist and public affairs officer. He lives in Walnut Creek.
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