Your Personal History Will Include AI

History Doesn’t Repeat, But Its Rhythms Tell Us Of Future Surprises

The Elephant In The Room

AI has arrived, a giant puncturing of the world. We’re all stirring around in its flood as we predict and use and fight its effects, the great cataclysmic rushing out of the waters of change. The dam has been broken and we are downstream. Much of what we say is based on our limited perceptions of change, and much of what we say is necessarily wrong since we are in the moment.

For instance, we predict that AI will destroy parts of the workforce and replace human capital—but that hasn’t happened yet and may take a decade for it to occur. What is true about the workforce is that it will change from men and women executing tasks as part of the economy to men and women steering AI to accomplish not only those tasks and also new jobs of which we have not yet conceived.

Is History a guide? We’ve had cataclysmic upheavals before. A tour of the winners and losers of past punctuation, or puncturing as I term it, can show what we might expect, in some gross or large-scale way.

Let’s talk about weaving and the Jacquard loom.

Losers: The elite working class, near-middle class that provided textiles, especially silk, to the world. Surprisingly, the owners of the old technology who fought the upheaval, and who decayed into museum pieces and into cottage industries (think Harris Tweed).

Winners: The new capitalists who could afford to build factories and displace the previous generation of weavers.

Turmoil: A near instantaneous resistance to the new looms. Riots, vandalism, economic destruction of a class of people, economic wealth for the early adopters, higher quantities of quality fabric and much reduced costs available to a much larger percentage of the population.

Timeframe: A decade or two for the new technology to be adopted across the French industry, and another decade or two for it to be inescapable across Europe and America.

Unexpected Consequences: Information technology. The looms were programmed and ran on cards, the same mechanisms that led us to Babbage’s machine and to Lovelace’s creation of code.

What about railroads?

Losers: Farmers, completely helpless under the yoke of a monopoly system. Surprisingly the elites who sought to prevent change (rail lines) across their lands, particularly in England, and the owners who had invested all in canals.

Winners: The men that ran the rails. Chicago, which fed the world.

Turmoil: Three waves of farmer organizing, forcing change, and being beaten back into powerlessness.

Timeframe: Two to three decades to build single rail systems (single to maintain the monopoly) into rural agricultural communities.

Unexpected consequences: The industrial revolution solved one of its unrecognized blockers—transportation. Distance collapsed, and markets became national, never to go back to local, isolated village economies. Agriculture itself industrialized and farms morphed into corporations.

What about the industrialization of warfare?

Losers: In World War I, the men in the trenches. In terms of economic costs, the Iraq and Afghanistan war will cost the US 2.5 trillion$ in medical expenses by 2050 (an aside, because the kill rate was down and the survival rate was up). Surprisingly though, pre-industrialized war also depended on sacrificing vast quantities of humanity; greater Waterloo, a five day campaign, sacrificed 100,000 killed, wounded or captured.

Losers also included the officer class of armies who fought the changes stupidly and pitted cavalry against machine guns (institutional slow-adopters).

Winners: The new class of officers who were fast adopters. The armament companies. Expansionist countries run on a wartime footing.

Timeframe: One and a half centuries, ongoing.

Turmoil: The building up of a diplomatic class and alliances to prevent those wars. The US adoption of continuous war as a national model. The collapse of a global system into a fragmented world disorder.

Unexpected Consequences: Technology has consistently outrun strategy. Asymmetric war has become constant (why the Vietcong won). Industrialized war has consistently wrecked global markets and become a force for deglobalization; e.g., drones are now creating as large an impact on oil markets as the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.

What about the Internet (and its love child the smartphone)?

Losers: Brick and mortar stores. Travel agents. Investment advisors. Those who couldn’t afford computers and connectivity.

Winners: First adopters (universities, researchers, the military, geeks). Commercializers, market shifters, the population who get information and goods faster and cheaper. Educators who can reach rural communities and children with better democratizing tools. Communication companies. Coffee shops.

Timeframe: 5-10 years for networks and tools, then the democratization and spreading through smartphones.

Turmoil: The internet fundamentally changes people through its applications and bandwidth. The list includes changing markets (destruction and creation), changing job markets (the shift for creators), cognitive patterns (how and how fast we process), exploitation (pornography, trafficking and slavery, online hidden pedophiles), creation of consumer markets targeting children (kinderbucks), disinformation, polarization, income inequality, unequal rollout (the digital divide), the stranding of parts of the population (seniors in particular) as resources morph online, money laundering.

Unexpected Unpredicted Consequences: The unrecognized need for security. Cybercrime. Permanence of information. The eradication of publishing costs, and the loss of old-fashioned gatekeepers. Generational divides (oldsters read online newspapers, GenZ lives in the blog/pod-osphere). Algorithms that weaponize consumption.

Your turn. AI has been here four years, starting in 2022, so the talking heads don’t know. Your guess is as good as theirs. Fill in the blanks and post on the blog:

Losers:

Winners:

Timeframe:

Turmoil:

Unexpected Consequences:

Bonus Points: Name other great historical punctures.