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The AI Revolution: Learning from History

• Dr. Jon Finn

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Dr. Jon Finn explores striking parallels between the Industrial Revolution and today's AI Revolution, highlighting the unprecedented competition to human brainpower that AI represents. Unlike the Industrial Revolution that unfolded over a century, the AI Revolution is happening in just 2-5 years, with predictions being realized faster than expected.

• First-time ever competition to human brainpower through neural networks that can work 24/7
• Industrial Revolution created jobs while the AI Revolution is eliminating them even in financially strong companies
• Henry Bessemer's steel-making technology that reduced production time from 4 days to 15 minutes serves as a historical parallel
• Approximately 100,000 tech sector jobs lost to AI this year already
• Companies are reallocating savings from human roles into building AI workforces
• Understanding history, particularly the Industrial Revolution, helps us prepare for AI changes
• Optimizing our brain states is key to becoming "AI winners" rather than being displaced

You're only ever one Brain State habit away from transformation.


Speaker 1:

Hello Habit Mechanics. It's Dr John Finn here. Hope you're having a great week so far. Today I want to talk about the Industrial Revolution and what we can learn from the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 1:

As we get deeper into the AI Revolution, there is, as you might expect, some, I suppose, what I would call AI denial narratives saying that this technology is not all that good and it won't make the changes that people are predicting. Looking at the tech, looking at the impact it has when people use it, well, I just cannot agree with those narratives. They don't make any sense. When you look at this from a first principle perspective, what we have for the first time ever is a is competition to human brain power. We've never had that before. We have a technology that's designed to work like our brains, to run on neural networks, and therefore it can do things that up until months, sometimes weeks ago, depending on what tech you're using only human brains could do, and it's getting smarter and cleverer every day. It doesn't have a limited um power capacity like our brains, in the sense of our brains need to shut down every sort of 24-hour cycle, if you like. You need to get that good seven, eight, nine, sometimes 10 hours or more sleep to really recharge the brain battery. The AI neural networks can be running 24 7. So the tech is real and it is going to make a massive impact. I've just no doubt about that.

Speaker 1:

And last week I was spending some time in London and I popped into the National Portrait Gallery and I was looking actually at the section in the Portrait Gallery which shows the scientists, the industrialists, the industrialists, the inventors that essentially drove the industrial revolution in England and Scotland and Great Britain. And there's some striking parallels between what happened in the industrial revolution and what is happening now. The difference is it's happening now at a speed that I don't think anyone was even predicting six months ago, but the industrial revolution probably happened over um a hundred year period. If you sort of look at the the rise of the technology, I'm sure someone will disagree with that, but for me that's broadly how it looks, how it seems to be also growing up in a. I grew up in a industrial revolution town and I kind of I've kind of seen the history of my own town over the period of time, how it changed, but not with my own eyes, but learning about the history of the place. But then if we look at the AI revolution. It's going to happen maybe over a period of two, three, four, five years, and some of the things they were predicting would happen in five years time have already happened. So there were some predictions about at the start of the month, of start of the year 2025, that the things that might be happening in five years, they're already happening. That's how quickly this is going.

Speaker 1:

But there's a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. Um, and maybe I won't mention them all in this pod, but there were some economic observations I was reading about from Adam Smith about why the Industrial Revolution would work from an efficiency perspective, and you can certainly extrapolate those insights directly into what we're seeing with agentic AI. There was, I think, something that I found really interesting and I'm going to start to cross over to the US now because I've also been consuming some things around around the US industrial revolution is that there was a if you're in the UK, you know Sheffield is the steel city and there was a famous Sheffield inventor called Henry Bessemer, and Henry Bessemer worked out how to cure steel if that's the right phrase to basically make steel faster, and he was employed then by Carnegie right in Pittsburgh to apologies if I'm getting my geography wrong here. I think it was Pittsburgh to make. Help him to make steel railway lines faster, and basically Bessemer's technology that he created could make a steel railway line that normally took a team of men four days to make. His system could make it in 15 minutes. 15 minutes that's exactly what we're seeing now, but we're seeing it for cognitive performance and the difference is when you can start making railway lines so quickly, you're going to create more jobs because now railway technologies are scalable and they're more affordable. So we're going to need more people laying the railway lines. We're going to need more people creating trains. There'll be more passengers on the trains right, and commerce increases all this kind of stuff. So the industrial revolution was a job generator.

Speaker 1:

The same is not true with AI. It will create some different jobs, but those jobs will be replacing or those jobs will not replace the number of jobs that AI replaces, if that makes sense and we're already seeing this, and this morning I read just an article on a technology website just timelining job losses in the tech sector in the states, and I think there's about 100 000 so far this year. Tech jobs have gone um in relation to ai, but it was showing what businesses were doing with those savings, because the difference with these job losses are is that the businesses that are shedding people are not under financial pressure. Businesses only normally lose people when they're not performing financially well. The businesses that are shedding workers have some of the strongest financial performance on the planet, and what this article is showing is is, yes, some people have been replaced because AI can automate their jobs, fully automate their jobs, so all the tasks they were previously paid to do, ai can now automate them. But they've also and that creates a big saving when you replace human roles with AI and what they're doing is they're reinvesting that saving into an AI workforce, if you like to put it in very simple language, which massively undersells what those people are doing. But there is this shift going on and it's not always very clear to see, because not every business is publicizing what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Um, but yeah, if you're interested in the ai revolution, how it's going to unfold, why it's happening, I think you know history is our greatest teacher and the industrial revolution is so well documented. I'd encourage you to revisit elements of that. There are some great figures who played major parts in that revolution. So there's lots of interesting things to get into. But again, we're not here to kind of scare anybody. We just want to help people to do better. And the first step to helping people to do better is we need to realize that this is not fake news. It's real. It's not the millennium bug. It's going to radically change how we work and how we live. But if we learn how to optimize our brain states, then we will become AI winners and we'll be able to help others do the same. And that's why we always say you're only ever one brain state away. Or, let me say that again, that's why we always say you're only ever one brain state. Habit that's the word I was missing habit away.