Here’s why India should look back 300 years to learn a lesson in AI

India’s dominance in tech outsourcing is facing an existential challenge not unlike what its world-beating textile industry battled — and lost — 300 years ago.

In the early 1700s, it took 50,000 hours to spin 100 pounds of cotton. “Indian spinners were regarded as the most productive in the world, and they produced the best-quality product,” as Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, note in a new paper. By 1795, however, automation had crunched the labour demand to 300 person-hours.