The International Monetary Fund has placed a measured but serious warning before European Union ministers: artificial intelligence carries within it both the promise of expanded prosperity and the seeds of deeper inequality. Speaking to EU leadership this week, the IMF framed AI not as a simple boon but as a dual force — one that can lift economies while simultaneously displacing workers and concentrating gains among the already advantaged. The question now before European policymakers is as old as industrialization itself, yet newly urgent: how does a society capture the gifts of a transforma