What the Industrial Revolution Teaches About AI Transitions

The power loom was invented in 1785. The Factory Act prohibiting employment of children under nine in textile mills was passed in 1833. The gap between those dates — forty-eight years — is the measure of institutional failure, the time a society took to build the first meaningful dam against a river already flooding. Two full generations of children entered the mills before the political system produced a law that said they should not. The full institutional infrastructure that eventually redirected industrialization toward broad-based prosperity — labor regulation, universal education, public health, the right to organize — took the better part of a century. The AI transition is reproducing this pattern at compressed timescales, and Landes's framework reveals the political economy beneath: who benefits, who bears costs, and what determines whether adaptation serves broad interests or narrow ones.