The ancient Greek world, with its steam engines, philosophers and mathematicians, seems an ideal location for a counterfactual. Any philosophical, social or initial technological development that we could label as essential to industrialisation, could at least plausibly have arisen in a Greek city or colony—possibly over a longer period of time.
But… steam engines, philosophers, and mathematicians aren’t the critical elements for the Industrial Revolution! If they were, it would have happened in Greece.
Here’s a short story of why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain/Holland/Northern Germany:
Six centuries of (mostly) peace, atomic households, and downward social mobility (i.e. the upper middle class having more children than the lower class, and their secondary and tertiary children becoming the lower middle class) led to a significant change in British demographics. It’s little surprise that the industrial revolution would occur in a nation of shopkeepers, and it took about 30 generations of evolution to make them shopkeepery enough to have the industrial revolution.
Abundant coal made energy cheap, even after wood and peat reserves were depleted. Steam engines became economically useful rather than toys, both because their inputs were cheaper and their outputs were more valuable (the first role for steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines).
The joint stock corporation originated in Dutch parishes to pay for polders. After being successfully used by people who knew each other closely for a generation or two, people familiar with it started using it with people they didn’t know to finance merchant expeditions to the Far East.
There are, of course, more details to the full story- but looking at why, say, the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China is critical to understanding this topic. (And even if you move it to China, which is at least somewhat more plausible, you only move it back a few centuries, not a few millennia.)
or we could jump ahead by having the internal combustion engine, not the steam engine, as the initial prime driver of industrialisation.
This also makes my inside knowledge bristle. Huygens and Papin worked together: Huygens, using gunpowder, had just invented one of the first internal combustion engines, and Papin used the principles they discovered to make a steam digester. What’s clear from the history, though, is that the internal combustion engine was a much harder problem, and water/steam was much more pleasant to work with. Many of the small improvements that would massively increase the efficiency of the various steam engines were necessary for the internal combustion engine to work at all! Mechanics and engineers having lots of experience with a simpler system- and enough commercial applications for that simpler system to drive the creation of superior tools and quality standards- are often necessary to tackle more complex systems.
You may disagree with some of these ideas, but it seems to me that there are just too many contingent factors that can mess up the input to the model, leading some putative parallel-universe Robin Hanson to give completely different times to brain emulations. This suggests the model is not very resilient.
From what I’ve read of Hanson’s model, it doesn’t give very precise predictions, and it doesn’t look like your counterfactuals would change all that much. Suppose the industrial revolution starts in ancient Greece, two millennia early. Well, now the time from agriculture to industrialism is ~10k years, instead of ~12k years. How will that update his estimate of uploads? Move it forward a decade? That seems well within the error bars of his prediction now.
In general, I am skeptical of these sorts of counterfactual arguments. They can illustrate causal models, sure, but if you have a bad model then that’s GIGO. I am much more confident in the “exponential growth” model of technological and scientific development than I am in the “invent X early” model of technological and scientific development. I mean, what stopped people from doing the Michelson-Morley experiment a century earlier and ruling out the aether that much more quickly? Well, it turns out that the experiment is extremely sensitive, and they were able to do it because they had access to some very finely crafted screws. Would the most precise screws in 1787 held a candle to the most precise screws in 1887? Unlikely. This is the sort of thing where the outside “exponential growth” model makes the right prediction, without knowing why. You have to have a lot of inside knowledge to know that screws are relevant to the experiment (which I know thanks to my experimental physics classes: it isn’t on the wikipedia page!), and that inside knowledge only helps with timing that one experiment!
But… steam engines, philosophers, and mathematicians aren’t the critical elements for the Industrial Revolution! If they were, it would have happened in Greece.
Here’s a short story of why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain/Holland/Northern Germany:
Six centuries of (mostly) peace, atomic households, and downward social mobility (i.e. the upper middle class having more children than the lower class, and their secondary and tertiary children becoming the lower middle class) led to a significant change in British demographics. It’s little surprise that the industrial revolution would occur in a nation of shopkeepers, and it took about 30 generations of evolution to make them shopkeepery enough to have the industrial revolution.
Abundant coal made energy cheap, even after wood and peat reserves were depleted. Steam engines became economically useful rather than toys, both because their inputs were cheaper and their outputs were more valuable (the first role for steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines).
The joint stock corporation originated in Dutch parishes to pay for polders. After being successfully used by people who knew each other closely for a generation or two, people familiar with it started using it with people they didn’t know to finance merchant expeditions to the Far East.
There are, of course, more details to the full story- but looking at why, say, the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China is critical to understanding this topic. (And even if you move it to China, which is at least somewhat more plausible, you only move it back a few centuries, not a few millennia.)
This also makes my inside knowledge bristle. Huygens and Papin worked together: Huygens, using gunpowder, had just invented one of the first internal combustion engines, and Papin used the principles they discovered to make a steam digester. What’s clear from the history, though, is that the internal combustion engine was a much harder problem, and water/steam was much more pleasant to work with. Many of the small improvements that would massively increase the efficiency of the various steam engines were necessary for the internal combustion engine to work at all! Mechanics and engineers having lots of experience with a simpler system- and enough commercial applications for that simpler system to drive the creation of superior tools and quality standards- are often necessary to tackle more complex systems.
From what I’ve read of Hanson’s model, it doesn’t give very precise predictions, and it doesn’t look like your counterfactuals would change all that much. Suppose the industrial revolution starts in ancient Greece, two millennia early. Well, now the time from agriculture to industrialism is ~10k years, instead of ~12k years. How will that update his estimate of uploads? Move it forward a decade? That seems well within the error bars of his prediction now.
In general, I am skeptical of these sorts of counterfactual arguments. They can illustrate causal models, sure, but if you have a bad model then that’s GIGO. I am much more confident in the “exponential growth” model of technological and scientific development than I am in the “invent X early” model of technological and scientific development. I mean, what stopped people from doing the Michelson-Morley experiment a century earlier and ruling out the aether that much more quickly? Well, it turns out that the experiment is extremely sensitive, and they were able to do it because they had access to some very finely crafted screws. Would the most precise screws in 1787 held a candle to the most precise screws in 1887? Unlikely. This is the sort of thing where the outside “exponential growth” model makes the right prediction, without knowing why. You have to have a lot of inside knowledge to know that screws are relevant to the experiment (which I know thanks to my experimental physics classes: it isn’t on the wikipedia page!), and that inside knowledge only helps with timing that one experiment!