The smartest and richest men in the world have a message for you about artificial intelligence, and the message is: relax. Yes, it will change everything. Yes, some jobs will go. But this is exactly what happened in the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution improved life for everyone. We are all richer now. So whatever you are feeling — the foreboding, the resume you no longer understand the point of — set it down. History has done this before and it turned out fine.
I believe them. I believe them so completely that I decided to do my own research into what the Industrial Revolution was actually like for the people who were alive during it — not the version on the graph, the version with the people in it. And I am pleased to report that the comparison is perfect. It is so perfect that I am going to walk you through it claim by claim, and I promise you will end up exactly where I did.
It did. Eventually. Here is the shape of "eventually." Between 1780 and 1840, output per British worker rose by about 46 percent. Over the same stretch, the real wages of the people doing the producing rose by about 12 percent. The machines got dramatically more productive; the humans operating them got slightly less hungry. Economists have a name for this half-century gap between what was produced and what workers were paid — they call it Engels' pause, and during it the profit rate roughly doubled and the share of the nation's income going to the owners of capital swelled at the expense of everyone who merely worked.
So the reassurance is airtight. The wealth is real and it arrives reliably — to the people who own the machine, immediately, and to the people who operate the machine, on a schedule of roughly fifty years, which is to say: to their grandchildren. If you own the AI, history's verdict is unambiguous and joyful. If you merely work alongside it, history counsels patience of a kind usually associated with cathedrals. And I think that is fine. I think fifty years is a reasonable amount of time to wait for a raise. I think the grandchildren will be grateful. I think the grandparents would have been grateful too, had they lived, which statistically many of them did not, but the ones who did saw the beginning of an extraordinary century, and that has to count for something, even if they personally could not afford shoes.
Also true, and beautifully so. Consider the hand-loom weavers. In the early 1800s this was a skilled, respected, well-populated trade — hundreds of thousands of people who had a craft, a wage you could raise a family on, and a place in the world. Then came the power loom. Over the course of roughly a generation their wages fell from a living to a slow starvation, and the trade was, as a way of life, deleted. The new jobs were created — in the mills, at lower pay, requiring less skill, and frequently filled by the weavers' own children, after the weavers themselves had been used up. "More jobs were created than destroyed" is true in precisely the way "the forest grows back" is true to the individual tree.
And this is the part where I need you to be honest with yourself, because the press will not say this and the economists will not say this and your union rep certainly will not say this, so I will: the weavers had to go. They had to. The power loom was better. It was faster, cheaper, and it did not need a pension. The weavers standing in front of it with their hammers were not heroes. They were an inefficiency. And the most compassionate thing the economy could do for them was replace them quickly, which it did, and then replace their children with slightly different machines, which it also did, and eventually the great-grandchildren got office jobs and central heating and nobody had to weave anything by hand ever again. That is progress. It hurts. It is supposed to hurt. The pain is how you know it's working.
We even have a word for the people who saw this coming. We call them Luddites, and we use it to mean someone too stupid and frightened to understand technology. I love this, because the actual Luddites understood the technology perfectly. They were not confused about what the machine did. They were skilled men watching their skill be erased in real time, and they were correct about every single part of it — except the part where smashing the machine would stop it. Parliament made breaking a frame a hanging offence in 1812, and the following year a row of them were hanged at York to make the point. They were not wrong about the future. They were just on the wrong end of it. And the wrong end of it is where the wrong people always are.
This is my favorite, because of the word temporary. Let us measure it. Engels' pause runs from about 1790 to 1840. Wages don't begin rising convincingly in step with productivity until after roughly 1850. The Factory Act that finally limited the hours of children in the mills came in 1833; the Act that stopped women and the smallest boys from being sent underground in the mines came in 1842; the great public-health reforms came in waves across the 1840s, '60s, and '70s, each one extracted by decades of agitation. From the altitude of a textbook, eighty years is a paragraph. From inside a human life, eighty years is the life. The "transition" was simply the entire span of everyone who happened to be born into it.
How was the transition, day to day? In 1842 the reformer Edwin Chadwick measured the average age at death by class and place. For a labourer in Manchester it was 17. In Liverpool it was about 15. These numbers are low mostly because so many working-class children simply died — the new industrial cities killed the young at a rate the countryside never had — which, if you are an optimist, makes the resilience of the survivors all the more inspiring. The average Englishman born into the early factory decades was, by the body measurements we have, no taller than his grandfather and quite possibly shorter. The machines were getting bigger. The people were not.
And I want to be clear: this was not a failure. This was the cost. Every great transformation has a cost, and the cost of the Industrial Revolution was paid in the bodies of working-class children in Manchester and Liverpool, and the return on that investment was the modern world, and I for one think the modern world is worth it. You are reading this on a device that exists because of what happened in those mills. The fact that you can read it at all — that you are literate, that you are warm, that you are probably not dying of cholera — is the dividend. Someone had to pay in. They paid in. You're welcome.
We are better off now. That part is completely real, and it is the part the comparison leans its entire weight on. But do your own research into how the wealth finally reached ordinary people, because it is the most important part and it is the part they leave out. The steam engine did not vote itself a weekend. The spinning frame did not draft the Factory Acts. The wealth spread because people organized and struck and were sometimes shot or hanged or transported for it; because Parliament, after decades of resistance, regulated the hours of children; because cities, only after cholera tore through them in 1832 and 1848 and 1854, finally consented to build sewers. The machine produced the wealth. Politics decided who received it — slowly, partially, against fierce resistance, and mostly long after the first generation was safely dead.
There is also the matter of the inputs. The cotton that fed the miracle of Lancashire was grown, in enormous part, by enslaved people on plantations in the American South — so thoroughly that when the American Civil War cut off the supply, the resulting Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65 threw the whole region into destitution. The miracle had a supply chain, and for decades the supply chain had chains.
So the good news about AI could not be clearer: it, too, will eventually make ordinary people better off — provided we successfully replay roughly a century of organizing, regulation, disaster, and reform, and provided you personally are standing at the end of that century rather than the beginning of it.
The clinching argument. Every doomer in history has been proven wrong; the line on the graph only ever goes up; the catastrophists predicted the end and instead we got dishwashers. And it is true that, in aggregate, across centuries, measured at the level of the species, things got better.
But the Luddite was not wrong about his own loom. The hand-loom weaver was not wrong about his own children's shoes. The Manchester labourer who died at thirty-something was not, in the event, consoled by the gross domestic product of 1900. "The pessimists are always wrong" is a sentence that only functions if you count in centuries and average across the dead. At the resolution of one actual human being holding one actual obsolete skill, the pessimist was usually right, and the optimist was usually a man who owned the factory and could afford the long view because he was not standing in it.
The comparison is exact, and I find that wonderful. AI is just like the Industrial Revolution. On a long enough timeline it will very probably make humanity richer and healthier than it is today. And on the short timeline — the one you actually have to live on — it will concentrate the gains spectacularly among the people who own the models, immiserate whatever class of skilled people it happens to find it can do without, and label the years in between "the transition." That word will appear, one day, in a textbook. It will appear on none of your bank statements.
And I am fine with that. I am fine with the transition. I am fine with the fifty-year lag. I am fine with the weavers and the miners and the children who died at fifteen in Liverpool, because they died in service of something larger than themselves, and the thing they died in service of is this — this world, this economy, this laptop, this article. Everything you have is a receipt from a transaction they did not consent to. And the next generation of receipts is being printed right now, by AI, and the people paying the cost are already visible — they are the artists and the writers and the translators and the coders and the customer service workers, and they are standing in front of the loom with their hammers, and they are absolutely correct about what is coming, and it does not matter, because the loom is better.
That is what the optimists mean when they say it will be fine. They mean: for someone. Eventually. On a graph. At a distance. They mean the way the Industrial Revolution was fine — which is to say, it was magnificent for the species and catastrophic for the individual, and anyone who can look at that ratio and feel reassured is either an owner, an economist, or a man who has never personally been the denominator in a productivity calculation. I have read the whole history. I know what "fine" costs. And I am here to tell you: it is worth it. The children of Manchester were worth it. The weavers were worth it. The Luddites who were hanged at York for the crime of understanding their own obsolescence were worth it. You will be worth it too. Your grandchildren will be so grateful.
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