What Can Economic History Teach Us About the AI Moment?

History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself but it rhymes. What does AI rhyme with? The Industrial Revolution, Printing Press, Railways, Electricity, the Internet?

What can we learn about:

• How long major general purpose technologies take to be adopted?
• When and to what they show up in GDP growth & lead to broader prosperity?
• What do they do to employment, what does it do to capital?

Are past technological breakthroughs helpful analogies to learn from? Or is this time completely different?

I’ll go on a whistle stop tour of technological revolutions in Economic History and draw useful analogies for the current moment.