When people talk about technological revolutions, they often focus on inventions — the steam engine, the power loom, the spinning jenny, the telegraph. But the real story of the Industrial Revolution wasn’t the machines.
It was the people, and how those machines reshaped their roles, skills, opportunities, and identities.
The Industrial Revolution was turbulent, painful, and deeply unequal at first. It destroyed old jobs, created new ones, shifted the power balance of the workforce, and ultimately defined a new middle class.
Sound familiar?
The same pattern is emerging in the AI era.
To understand where AI will take the workforce, we must understand what happened the last time technology rewrote the foundations of work.
Before industrialization, most labor in Europe and America was skilled artisanal work:
These workers:
Then machines arrived.
Early factories didn’t need master weavers — they needed workers who could:
The skill bar collapsed.
Artisans who trained for a decade suddenly competed with unskilled laborers trained in days.
The first major wave of skill displacement had begun.
New roles emerged that had never existed:
These roles:
They became the new working class — with rising importance and income.
The Industrial Revolution also created a new elite: engineers.
They understood:
Engineers became:
Skill bifurcation created:
This is exactly the pattern unfolding in the AI workforce.
Industrialization didn’t just shift skills — it reshaped wage structures.
Most workers earned wages within a moderate band.
Wages split into three tiers:
This hollowing-out effect is one of the most predictable outcomes of technological disruption.
We already see polarization today:
In short:
AI compresses the bottom and stretches the top — just like the Industrial Revolution.
Perhaps the most misunderstood lesson of the Industrial Revolution:
It created far more jobs than it destroyed — just not in the categories anyone expected.
New jobs that did not exist before industrialization:
Later:
These roles emerged because new machines created new ecosystems of work.
AI is creating roles that didn’t exist 3 years ago:
Many more will emerge.
AI doesn’t eliminate work — it transforms it.
Modern companies increasingly resemble early factories.
This includes:
Their tasks are repetitive and rule-based — ideal for AI automation.
Just as artisans lost ground to machines, these roles will shrink or evolve.
These are workers who combine domain expertise with AI tools:
Their output will be 3–10× higher than un-augmented peers.
They will form the backbone of the AI-era economy.
These are the equivalents of industrial engineers in the 1900s:
These workers will be the highest leverage roles in the AI economy.
AI isn’t reducing the need for technical leadership —
it’s dramatically increasing it.
Just like the Industrial Revolution eventually rebuilt the middle class, AI will create:
The distortion will be temporary, not permanent.
The Industrial Revolution teaches two timeless truths:
The destruction feels immediate, but creation overwhelms it long term.
Workers who cling to old processes fall.**
In the AI era:
Technology rewards adaptability, not seniority.
In the next chapter, we turn to the smartphone and cloud revolutions — and what they teach us about platform shifts and how entirely new industries emerge around breakthrough technologies.
Chapter 7 — Electricity & Industrialization
What the electrification era teaches us about AI, productivity lags, workflow redesign, and why the true AI boom will arrive years after the hype.
Chapter 9 — Cloud & Smartphone Era Lessons
What cloud computing and smartphones teach us about AI adoption, job transformation, S-curve platform shifts, and the birth of entirely new industries.