What a 200-Year-Old Loom Tells Us About our AI future

Welcome to Transformational Technology – Exploring moments where technology changed everything—for the better.

I believe that technology is the single most powerful lever for positive change in human society. It’s how we overcome limits, unlock creativity, and reimagine what’s possible. This weekly newsletter will spotlight examples where a technological insight, invention, or application led to genuine human progress. Some examples changed the course of civilisation. Others simply made life fairer, safer, or more human. Each one, I find inspirational and hope you do to.

This Week: The Loom That Dreamed in Code

In 1801, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, a French inventor named Joseph Marie Jacquard introduced a machine that would quietly shape the future. His invention? A loom. Not a new loom, but a loom that could think—or at least, follow instructions.

Using a series of punched cards, the Jacquard loom could automatically weave complex patterns into fabric without the direct, continuous intervention of a skilled human weaver. By encoding information onto these cards—holes for “yes”, no hole for “no”—the loom could interpret and execute an entire design, thread by thread, line by line.

It was elegant. Efficient. Revolutionary.

But perhaps most importantly, it was programmable.

Threads That Lead to Today

Jacquard’s loom may have been built for silk and thread, but the ideas behind it planted seeds that would eventually grow into the modern computer—and, much later, the AI systems transforming our world today.

More than a century later, Charles Babbage, widely considered the father of computing, referenced the Jacquard loom as inspiration for his Analytical Engine—a conceptual machine that could carry out operations based on programmed instructions. Babbage’s collaborator, Ada Lovelace, saw something even deeper: that a machine like this might be able to manipulate symbols, not just numbers. It could compose music. Solve problems. Generate ideas.

Sound familiar?

What the loom did with silk, modern AI does with language, code, images, and data. And like Jacquard’s innovation, today’s AI tools are often not inventing entirely new things from scratch—but using encoded instructions, training data, and statistical inference to generate something astonishing.

Automation Anxiety: Then and Now

The Jacquard loom was not without controversy.

To the skilled weavers of the time, it represented a threat to their livelihoods and identities. The Luddite movement—often misunderstood today—was born from this anxiety. It wasn’t technology itself they feared, but what they saw as the loss of control, dignity, and craft in the face of faceless machinery.

We’re hearing echoes of that same tension today.

AI tools now write copy, generate code, compose music, pass legal exams, and draw images. For many knowledge workers, creatives, and professionals, these systems prompt the same questions that the loom raised for weavers:

Will this replace me?

What value do I bring now?

Who decides how this technology is used—and for whose benefit?

Reweaving the Social Fabric

But here’s the part we often miss in the early stages of technological upheaval:

The Jacquard loom didn’t destroy weaving—it transformed it.

Yes, it displaced some traditional roles. But it also democratized access to intricate textiles that were once reserved for the wealthy. It freed up time and labour that could be directed toward other creative and commercial pursuits. It pushed humanity toward a new relationship with machines—one that ultimately led to entire new industries, roles, and forms of art and expression.

In the same way, AI is challenging us to redefine what it means to be creative, to be productive, to be human. The future of work won’t just be about replacement—it will be about redistribution, augmentation, and reimagination.

Just as the loom enabled weavers to focus more on design than repetition, AI can give us the tools to think bigger, faster, and more collaboratively. It doesn’t diminish the value of human input—it changes where that value lies.

So What Do We Do Now?

We’re at a similar inflection point to the early 1800s. A new class of machine has arrived, capable of executing tasks once considered the sole domain of human thought. And just like then, we have a choice.

We can fear the machine—or we can understand it, shape it, and use it to build something better.

The loom teaches us that transformational technology doesn’t just change industries—it rewrites what’s possible. But only if we choose to harness it wisely.