Sometimes it is hard to grasp how quickly the giant tech companies have come to dominate the world economy. Ten years ago, only one of them, Microsoft , was among the biggest companies in the world as measured by market capitalization. These days, the top five usually consists of Apple , Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon , Microsoft and Facebook .

It has been an astonishingly rapid rise for the tech giants, and it’s far from over. The big question for the future is: How will their ever-expanding control affect other businesses and the labor market?

Over the past decade, Google, Facebook and Amazon have wreaked havoc on much of the creative economy—journalists, musicians, authors, filmmakers. In the decade ahead, the tech behemoths will use their dominance in artificial intelligence to overturn much of the service economy as well, including transportation, medicine and retail. With what result? To give just one example, Goldman Sachs recently reported that self-driving cars (a technology that both Google and Apple are developing) could eliminate as many as 300,000 jobs a year in two decades or more.

Will we be ready when the flood of unemployment brought about by the artificial-intelligence revolution is upon us? Politicians are dodging the issue, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently assured Mike Allen of the news website Axios that any big change wouldn’t arrive for up to a century: “I think that is so far in the future—in terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs—I think we’re, like, so far away from that, that [it is] not even on my radar screen.” At the Code Conference in California earlier this summer, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen also rejected this “fallacy.” “It’s a recurring panic,” he said. “This happens every 25 or 50 years. People get all amped up about ‘machines are going to take all the jobs,’ and it never happens.”

Leaving aside which side of this argument is correct, the fact is that we are rushing ahead into the AI universe with almost no political or policy debate about its implications. Digital technology has become critical to the personal and economic well-being of everyone on the planet, but decisions about how it is designed, operated and developed have never been voted on by anyone. Those decisions are largely made by executives and engineers at Google, Facebook, Amazon and other leading tech companies, and imposed on the rest of us with very little regulatory scrutiny. It is time for that to change.