AI Transition Week: AI in the Context of Technological Revolutions

What can we learn from the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution?

How do they help us predict the outcomes of the AI transition?

And what questions remain unanswered?

Two professors of history and experts in technological revolutions will set up the context of this AI transition through analyzing the Industrial Revolution. We will explore what commonalities this supposed “AI Revolution” might share with the Industrial Revolution, and how history can guide our expectations for what lies ahead.

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Professor Priya Satia (Stanford University) is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, and the ideas and practices of economic transformation. Her books, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008), Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018), and Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020), have won numerous awards and contribute to her expertise in connecting lessons from the Industrial Revolution to the present.

Professor Trevor Jackson (University of California, Berkeley) is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the seventeenth century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital. His books, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World (W.W. Norton, 2026), will help inform the potential effects of inequality coming from AI today.

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