The Vibe-Horsing Coal-&-Steam Revolution of the 1700s
It was steam-engine pioneer James Watt coined and quantified “horsepower” as a sales gimmick to sell steam engines. The point was that steam engines could replace your power-horses, not multiply...
It was steam-engine pioneer James Watt coined and quantified “horsepower” as a sales gimmick to sell steam engines. The point was that steam engines...
The strongest version of this narrative is its historical grounding in Jevons’s Paradox, using the steam engine’s displacement of horses and amplification of coal demand as a clear analogy for AI’s potential impact on labor. It rightly highlights that efficiency gains don’t uniformly benefit all stakeholders—coal barons thrived, horse breeders collapsed—and extends this to modern knowledge work, where AI may act as a complement for some (e.g., software engineers) while rendering others obsolete....