Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.

In just a few months, Microsoft broke speed records in establishing ChatGPT, a form of generative artificial intelligence that it plans to invest $10 billion into, as a household name. And last month, Sundar Pichai, C.E.O. of Alphabet/Google, unveiled a suite of A.I. tools — including for email, spreadsheets and drafting all manner of text. While there is some discussion as to whether Meta’s recent decision to give away its A.I. computer code will accelerate its progress, the reality is that all competitors to Alphabet and Microsoft remain far behind.

The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that control over information is central to who has power and what they can do with it. At the beginning of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, most scribes were the sons of elite families, primarily because education was expensive. In medieval Europe, the clergy and nobility were much more likely to be literate than ordinary people, and they used this advantage to reinforce their social standing and legitimacy.

Literacy rates rose alongside industrialization, although those who decided what the newspapers printed and what people were allowed to say on the radio, and then on television, were hugely powerful. But with the rise of scientific knowledge and the spread of telecommunications came a time of multiple sources of information and many rival ways to process facts and reason out implications. Access to facts about the outside world weakened and ultimately helped to destroy Soviet control over Poland, Hungary, East Germany and the rest of its former sphere of influence.

Starting in the 1990s, the internet offered even lower-cost ways to express opinions. But over time the channels of communication concentrated into a few hands including Facebook, whose algorithm exacerbated political polarization and in some well-documented cases also fanned the flames of ethnic hatred. In authoritarian regimes, such as China, the same technologies have turned into tools of totalitarian control.

With the emergence of A.I., we are about to regress even further. Some of this has to do with the nature of the technology. Instead of assessing multiple sources, people are increasingly relying on the nascent technology to provide a singular, supposedly definitive answer. There is no easy way to access the footnotes or links that let users explore the underlying sources.

This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth. Combi