Source: TW
Industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution was like a Permian extinction level event for many peoples around the world. Many parts of the world have still not entirely come to terms with it: it either created new faultlines or exacerbated old ones and continues to do so.
Artisans
It was particularly brutal on the artisanal groups. Only these Japanese, to a degree, were able to balance this assault on their artisanal guilds. In India, it destroyed the service castes: leaders like the faux mahAtman never understood its real significance.
Beneficiaries
In contrast, certain castes/groups were either unaffected or enhanced by it. The English elite went through it with much diminution and a degree of enhancement despite facing societal degeneration.
The Adyunmatta-s had a bonanza, but ironically, they also contributed to the explosion of rudhironmAda as a reaction to it. In India certain jAti-s weathered it like the English elite while others went down.
India, as an old nation, had a huge downside from it, while America, as a young nation, saw a certain upside from it.
AI
One of the questions that one frequently hears these days is whether AI will cause the same. Like the original IR, there will be phases. When people saw Watt’s engine or read Sadi Carnot’s papers, many probably did not think there was a revolution on the horizon. One could slip into such an attitude with AI. While energetics remains a constraint, we are increasingly inclined to have a grim sense of it though the timeline still remains quite unpredictable.
Reaction unmAda-s
One question that we are unable to nail down properly is whether it will spawn a reaction like rudhironmAda. We believe that will happen but the shape of it is what we are finding hard to prognosticate. The degree of its success of course depends on whether it will subvert whole nations like the rUs or the shUlapuruSha-s and which would be those nations. The cognitive landscape of India combined with the more traditional millennium old problem of the older unmAda-s suggest that it will add new downside those introduced by the IR.
Continuing on this train of thought and the comparison with rudhironmAda, we find the following rather interesting:
- though rudhironmAda originated in shUlapuruShIyadesha which was at the vanguard of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution (the chemistry revolution) it took root in the weakly industrialized rUs. Thus, the place of origin of an unmAda might not be the same as where it takes deep root. Instead, a short-lived mirror image formation of National Socialism emerged among the shUlapuruSha-s. Likewise, we know that the unmAda-s emerging in reaction to AI will likely emerge in USA but where it will take over a country is unclear.