So, something happened last week at the University of Central Florida that I need to talk about. Gloria Caulfield, a vice president at Tavistock Development Company, that's a real estate and development firm, by the way, not a tech company, was invited to deliver the commencement speech for UCF's College of Arts and Humanities at the Nicholson School of Communication and Media. These are graduating writers, artists, journalists, designers, people who have just spent 4 years training to do things that AI companies are not claiming their products can do. I'm going to link the full speech in the description if you'd like to hear it, but let me give you the brief summary of the highlights that are relevant to our discussion today. Caulfield opened by praising Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz as leaders of significant accomplishment, already a bold choice for a room full of humanities graduates. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. Oh. What? What happened? Okay. I struck a chord. May I finish? She then tried to recover with only a few years ago AI was not a factor in our lives. The crowd cheered, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not a contradictory response. They booed the future she was selling them, and they cheered the past when it didn't exist. This is not bipolar, which is what Caulfield called it. That's entirely consistent. Now, for context, the same graduation season, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, gave a commencement speech about AI at Carnegie Mellon University, standing ovation, ecstatic reception, because Carnegie Mellon is a STEM school. Those graduates build AI. They see it as expanding their professional value. UCF's Arts and Humanities graduates see it as a direct threat to the thing they've just spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars learning to do. Same technology, same message, opposite reactions. That alone tells you something important about who this revolution is currently working for. One of the graduates, Hadia Elter, called Caulfield a corporate mouthpiece and said, "To stand in front of a graduating class of artists and communicators and discuss Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz is to spit on our efforts to flip the script." And Caulfield, she posted on Instagram afterwards describing it as an extraordinary evening where she was humble to spend the night igniting optimism and potential in our future leaders, which is a fascinating interpretation of being booed by several thousand people. Software engineer Cable Sasser put it perfectly on Blue Sky, "When you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is, but everybody isn't." So, look, I watched this clip and my first reaction was the same as a lot of yours, tone deaf, read the room, don't tell a graduating class of artists that the thing threatening their careers is the next industrial revolution and expect applause. I get it, I felt it. But then I did the thing that having a PhD in computer science has unfortunately conditioned me to do, I asked, "Wait, is she actually right?" Not in the way she meant it, not "Isn't this exciting?" But factually, structurally, is AI comparable to the Industrial Revolution? So, I went and looked and I need to tell you what I found because the comparison is far more accurate than Gloria Caulfield intended, and that is precisely what should terrify us.

Let's talk about the Industrial Revolution, not the version we learned in school, steam engines, factories, progress, moving on, but what actually happened to the people who lived through it. The British Industrial Revolution, roughly 1760 to 1840, was one of the most transformative periods in human history. That part is true. It gave us mechanized manufacturing, railways, urbanization, and eventually the modern world also true. But here's the part that tends to get left out of the inspirational commencement speech version. Workers, including children as young as five, labored 12 to 16-hour shifts, 60s a week, in factories with no safety regulations, no rights, and wages that barely cover the cost of living. Over 50% of workers in some British factories in the early 1800s were under the age of 14. Children were preferred because they were small enough to crawl under machinery to unclog it, and when the machine suddenly restarted, they lost fingers and limbs. In coal mines, children as young as five were stripped of their clothes, chained to coal carts, and sent into shafts 16 inches high. Arriving late to work could mean a beating. Dosing off at your machine could cost you an arm. I want to pause and emphasize that these are not metaphors. These are documented historical facts. A technology executive in 2026 might describe this era as a time of profound change, which it definitely was, but it was also a time of mass child exploitation, industrial-scale human suffering, and a general decline in health, including increased tuberculosis, respiratory disease, malnutrition, and trauma. That reminds me of something, doesn't it?

Destruction of traditional ways of life. The Industrial Revolution triggered an enormous demographic shift, pulling young adults out of rural communities and into urban factory towns. Entire ways of life, agricultural, artisanal, community-based, were dismantled in a generation. People who had been skilled craftspeople found their trades automated and their skills worthless. This was not a gentle transition. It was a forced migration from one economic reality into another, driven not by choice, but by the collapse of the old system's ability to sustain the people who depended on it. If you're a graduating humanity student in 2026 who's just watched AI generated content flood the market you were training to enter, this might feel somewhat recognizable.

Then health and life expectancy. Here's a detail that should be in every schoolbook and somehow isn't. Life expectancy in England stagnated between roughly 1820 and 1870, a 50-year period during the height of the Industrial Revolution because rapid urbanization brought contaminated water, overcrowded housing, epidemic disease, and industrial pollution. Working-class life expectancy at birth in industrial towns was often as low as 25 to 35 years. The dense smog that blackened industrial cities shortened lives and increased mortality rates across the board. An NBR [snorts] study found that growing industrial coal use from 1851 to 1900 alone reduced life expectancy by at least half a year, and the economic cost of that lost life was equivalent to roughly 0.3 to 1% of annual GDP. So, the Industrial Revolution made the country richer, it also made its workers sicker, shorter lived, and more miserable for decades before the benefits started filtering down. Economists have found only a small rise in consumption between 1760 to 1820, 60 years of near stagnation with rapid improvement only after 1820, and even that improvement was offset by environmental decay and inequality so severe that some researchers argue unmeasured costs more than wiped out any gains in well-being from rising wages. 60 to 100 years of worsened or stagnant conditions before things got meaningfully better. Just let that sit for a second. Then inequality. The wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution was extraordinary. The distribution of that wealth was obscene. Factory owners and industrialists accumulated fortunes while their workers, including the children, earned subsistence wages. Inequality increased steadily throughout the industrialization period, and the gap between the people generating the wealth and the people capturing it widened year after year. In 2025, the ratio of US home prices to median household income hit a near record 5.1, up from 3.1% in 1985. 65% of American households cannot afford a newly built medium-price home. The median age of a first-time home buyer has risen from 29 in the 1980s to 40 today. Tech CEOs are becoming the wealthiest humans in recorded history while telling graduating students that the technology making them wealthy is an exciting opportunity. Hmm.

Next, let's talk about political disenfranchisement. Now, this one is my favorite, and I need to explain it in a way that makes sense for everyone watching. Before 1832, the British political system had something called rotten boroughs. These were parliamentary constituencies, essentially electoral districts, that had been created centuries earlier when they were actual towns, but had since depopulated to almost nothing. A village with 12 people might still elect two members of Parliament. Meanwhile, Manchester, which had grown into the beating heart of the entire Industrial Revolution, one of the largest and most economically significant cities in the country, had zero members of Parliament. No political representation whatsoever. The city powering the revolution had no voice in the system governing it. By the 1831 election, 152 out of 406 elected members of Parliament were chosen by fewer than 100 voters each. 50 constituencies had fewer than 50 voters. The system was designed for a world that no longer existed, and the people who benefited from keeping it that way fought furiously to prevent reform. For my American viewers, imagine if a congressional district that had a population of 30 people in rural Wyoming had the same representation as the entire city of Chicago. And when Chicago asked for a representative, the people benefiting from the old system said, "Absolutely not. This would destroy the fabric of governance." That's what was happening back then. It took massive popular demonstrations, threats to the monarchy, and a constitutional crisis before the Reform Act of 1832 finally abolished the worst of the rotten boroughs and gave cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds their first members of Parliament. And even then, the working classes gained almost nothing. The reform primarily benefited the middle classes, and it took decades before ordinary workers got the vote. Now, think about the communities in Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia where data centers are being built without meaningful local consent, extracting water and electricity at industrial scale, and the residents have effectively no power to stop it. Think about the fact that I covered in a recent video how a county water director in Georgia responded to discovering unauthorized water extraction by Blackstone subsidiary with its cold customer service. The infrastructure of this revolution is being built inside communities that have no meaningful say over it. The rotten boroughs are not gone. They just look different today.

Let's talk about the reform question, and this is the part of the industrial revolution story that nobody includes in commencement speeches because it just inconvenient. The industrial revolution did not automatically get better. The getting better part required massive legislative reform that elites fought at every single stage. The first Factory Act was passed in 1802 and was by historical consensus absolutely futile. It took another 30 years of campaigning, agitation, and political pressure before the 1833 Factory Act began to meaningfully restrict child labor and even that only applied to textile factories. Factory owners protested that any restriction on working hours would force them to close their mills, which is a sentence you can transpose directly into 2026 by replacing factory owners with tech executives and working hours with AI regulation. The pattern was the same every time. Workers suffered, reformers documented the suffering, elites said regulation would destroy the economy, reformers pushed harder, elites resisted, eventually after decades the laws changed, and the introduction of the 10-hour day proved to have none of the dire consequences its opponents had predicted. The economy didn't collapse, the factories didn't close, the predictions of disaster were wrong, they were always wrong, they were just useful for the people making them.

So, was Georgia Caulfield right? Is AI the next industrial revolution? Yeah, she might actually be right, but probably not in the way she meant it. The industrial revolution was not a one-off switch that turned peasants into city workers. It was not a clean transition from old to new. It was a century of displacement, exploitation, environmental destruction, political disenfranchisement, and staggering inequality followed by decades of hard-won reform that only happened because ordinary people organized, protested, and demanded that the systems governing them catch up with the reality they were living in. The people alive during the worst of it did not experience the next industrial revolution as an inspirational talking point. They experienced it as their children losing fingers in machines. Every generation that has benefited from the industrial revolution has benefited from it because previous generations paid the cost and fought for the reforms that made the benefits possible. We are the beneficiaries of technologies the industrial revolutions created. We're also the beneficiaries of the factory acts, the reform acts, the labor movements, the environmental regulations, and the political reforms that ensured those technologies eventually served people rather than just the people who owned them. And that is the question for right now. Not is AI the next industrial revolution? The answer to that is probably yes. The question is instead what kind of industrial revolution is this one going to be? Are the reforms going to come in year five or year 60? Are the people building the infrastructure going to be held accountable by the communities they operate in, or are we going to wait until a citizen in Georgia has to file an FOIA request just to find out why the water pressure dropped? I generally don't know how this plays out. Nobody does. It's possible that AI delivers on its enormous potential and the transition is smoother than any previous technological revolution. I pray for that. It's also possible that it doesn't, but even the word bubble only applies if AI fails to deliver what it's supposed to deliver, and technology evolves continuously. So, the honest answer is that the uncertainty itself is the hard part. We're in a situation where the potential upside is extraordinary and the downside risk is serious, and nobody can tell you with confidence which way it breaks. That is not a comfortable place for all of us to be in, and I understand why all of us are a bit scared. What I do know is that the pain of change is never distributed evenly. It wasn't during the industrial revolution, and it won't be now. The graduates in the UCF Arena are not the same as the graduates at Carnegie Mellon. A writer in Orlando and an AI engineer in Pittsburgh are living through the same technological moment with completely different levels of exposure to its consequences. Telling both of them that this is an exciting thing is at best oblivious. Those students were right to boo, not because Caulfield was wrong about the comparison, but because she talked about it as if it were good news to an audience for whom it very much isn't, at least not yet. The industrial revolution was definitely transformative. It was also devastating. Both things can be true at the same time, and which one you experienced depended entirely on where you stood in the system. If you want a deeper look at what's actually happening on the ground, the water extraction, the noise pollution, the billions being charged to communities, check out the video on your screen right now, the data center backlash. And if you want to explore whether what you're feeling about AI is really about technology or about something deeper, I cover that in my video on AI sentiment. I'm going to link both of those in the description. Thank you all so much for watching. Subscribe, and I'll see you all in the next one.