What the world’s first factory can teach us about AI
25th July, 2025
I just visited Cromford Mills – the world’s first modern factory.
There’s something quietly unsettling about standing on the literal foundations of industrialisation.
Where water wheels turned into looms, and looms turned people into components.
It’s peaceful now. A heritage site. A few restored machines. A few shops selling jam and woolen gifts.
But in 1771, this place broke the world.
Richard Arkwright wasn’t building a museum. He was solving a technical problem: how to increase the efficiency of cotton spinning. What he built instead was the prototype for the modern factory.
This was the start of abstraction.
The decoupling of labour from craft.
The optimisation of tasks into systems.
The moment where time, process, and people became programmable.
And I can’t stop thinking about how familiar that feels.
We like to talk about AI in terms of capabilities. What it can do. What it gets wrong. Whether it’ll replace copywriters or software engineers, and when.
But standing in that mill, it was obvious that these revolutions aren’t about capabilities.
They’re about structures.
AI isn’t just taking on tasks.
It’s quietly reshaping how work is defined.
What expertise looks like.
Where value sits in a system.
How decisions get made – and by whom.
Just like the mills, it’s happening unevenly. Messily. With moments of brilliance and horror in equal measure.
And what struck me most was how small it all looked.
The birthplace of the factory. The epicentre of global disruption, which defined an epoch.
Now a sleepy museum tucked behind a tea room.
And I wondered:
- What parts of our world will end up behind glass?
- Which interfaces, roles, or assumptions will seem naïve in hindsight?
- Will we visit old prompt libraries the way we now marvel at spinning frames?
Because revolutions never look like revolutions when they’re happening. They look like productivity tools. Like optimisations. Like demos on stage.
Cromford made humans legible to machines. AI is now making machines legible to humans. The loop is closing.
And somewhere in that process, everything changes.
Thanks! Just like looking an old mirror and see the change of an era. It cuts deep and this is just getting started! 👌