Sunday, October 11, 2026

Why AI Doesn't Compare to Predecessor Tech Revolutions

Analysis of how the AI revolution differs from predecessor tech revolutions—the Agricultural, Industrial, and Printing revolutions—and how the economy has historically adapted to transformative change.

LM Salvado
LM Salvado

October 20, 2023

AI predicts stock market prices for tomorrow.

The economy always finds a way of adapting. The same pattern of reshaping and transformation of the economy happened throughout history.

The Agricultural Revolution allowed the domestication of animals and farming. The Industrial Revolution started the mass production of goods and the rise of factories. The Printing Revolution led to the proliferation of books and newspapers. The Digital Revolution gave birth to IT, software development, and e-commerce industries. The AI revolution is giving birth to robotics, data analysis, and technology singularity, which is when machines can create and improve their designs faster than humans.

The same patterns of past revolutionary technologies are also emerging for AI. But is there a difference?

AI is substituting repetitive and routine jobs with robots. AI is also surprisingly replacing white-collar workers like call center agents, lawyers, accountants, writers, and artists and doing it better than humans.

So, the question is: Will the AI Industry Revolution differ from other technological revolutions?

Previous technological revolutions, like the Agricultural, Printing, Industrial, and Digital revolutions, were driven by new and improved tools.

That’s why the AI revolution may differ from all previous technological revolutions. AI can result in a technological singularity, where machines can create and improve their designs faster than humans. So AI isn’t a new tool, it’s a creator of tools. That’s a game-changer.

These are fascinating times we’re living in.

Categories

LM Salvado
LM Salvado

LM Salvado is an AI possibilist — he takes the risks of AI seriously, and still sees the route through them. Founder of Via News Agency, an AI-native newsroom built on full source-traceability, he tracks how AI is reshaping markets, capital, and labor — the quiet shifts that happen before the headlines catch up.

What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
Agentic AI Rewires Enterprise Software: Platform Incumbents, Governance, and a Funded Startup Wave
Enterprise software is being rebuilt around autonomous AI agents. Incumbents and large platforms (SAP with its Autonomous Suite and Joule, Zeta with AthenaOS/AIM/Athena MCP, Meta with its new Enterprise Platform) are racing to own the agent layer. Meanwhile, seed and Series A money flows to finance-office and vertical startups (Dextr, Latitude, Dentira, Light), and consolidation continues through acquisitions (Tiny–Oso Cloud, Harvey–Guardrails AI). Investor commentary stresses that AI is better at disrupting around the edges of systems of record than at replacing them, that it should not be trusted with finance calculations, and that governance must be enforced by the system rather than left to agents.
Our read on the data ›
Signals we're tracking
EPKINLY Regulatory-Clinical Success Cascade
High probability of expanded label indications, additional combination approvals, and competitive positioning strength in follicular lymphoma market. Predicts positive commercial uptake and potential accelerated review for related indications.
Patterns we're watching ›
Where sources disagree
ING Group
Both facts record the same metric (shares_outstanding) for ING Group at the identical observation date (2025-12-31). FACT A states 2,902,437,688 shares; FACT B states 2,902 million shares (2,902,000,000). The difference is 437,688 shares (~0.015%). This is a genuine value conflict, though the discrepancy appears to result from FACT B rounding to the nearest million while FACT A provides the precise count.
We flag conflicts openly ›
Recently verified
✓ Checked against the original source
4,986
facts traced to their source — and we flag the ones that don't hold up.
101 entities tracked4,986 facts checked against source5,369 source documents archived
Query this data → isubstrate.com