Anton Koronek

And if you were basically an artisan weaver or something like that, then you were actually a pretty skilled professional doing your trade.

And all of a sudden, you had these machines coming along that could do what you were doing, but an order of magnitude cheaper.

So those artisans, they lost their livelihood essentially overnight, and they were impoverished.

But I guess, you know, looking at the positive side, their descendants lived in a world where you had

cheap textiles and soon all other kinds of cheap industrial goods and they lived to be much wealthier than their artisan parents or grandparents who lost their job in the first wave of the industrial revolution

And that can be hugely disruptive and painful for the individual.

But if we have a little bit of social protection, we can mitigate the disruption and we can make sure that in the end, everybody actually benefits.

Well, I very much hope that we can all benefit.

And I'll say just in terms of the economic possibilities, if you grow the size of the pie and if you grow it by orders of magnitude, it's possible, at least in principle, that everybody benefits.

But whether or not that's going to happen is a story that is yet to be written.

And it's going to be challenging.

It's going to be challenging because at first there will be small sectors where people are losing out.

And then there's going to be a debate, well, why should we help them?

We didn't help, let's say, other workers in previous technological revolutions that much.

And then the size of those sectors that are disrupted is probably going to go up.

And then eventually, most people will be affected at this, but it's not going to happen overnight.

It's going to be a somewhat slow process.

And our society is going to continually debate how should we react to this?

What are the best things to do about this?

Yeah, in some ways, the way that I see the Industrial Revolution is that it first consisted of basically building machines that could automate a lot of our physical strength.