Final Episode: David Mindell on What It Takes to Power an Industrial Revolution

David Mindell is a historian, an engineer, a startup founder, a venture investor—and now the author of The New Lunar Society: An Englightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution. The 2025 MIT Press volume is all about James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and the other inventors and entrepreneurs who kickstarted the first industrial revolution in Great Britain back in the late eighteenth century, and what they got right and what they missed about how technology can transform work and how to translate invention into social progress. But it’s also about how engineers innovate (or fail to innovate) today, and what they might learn or relearn if they took a look back at that founding generation of industrialists. 

Mindell, who's been a friend ever since we were both doctoral students in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society in the early 1990s, is the perfect guest for this 60th and final episode of Soonish. The show has always been motivated by a set of big questions: How is computing changing the nature of work, play, artistic expression, and communication? How can we design our cities, our transportation systems, and even our political systems to be more resilient? In an economy dominated by strife-fueled social media and rising technofeudalist empires, what's the future of democracy? How much of our techological future is predetermined, and how much of it can we shape proactively? 

David brings to bear the tools of historical scholarship—along with his experience in engineering, academia, and the entrepreneurial world—to explore the same kinds of questions. This new book, in particular, asks how Watt, Boulton, and their colleagues distilled Enlightenment scientific values, hands-on experimentation, and collaboration into a set of founding principles for industrial society—and how can we rethink those principles for a world of labor scarcity, climate change, pandemics and other global disruptions, and burgeoning new technologies like artificial intelligence.

For show notes, links, and a full transcript of this episode, please visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-517-what-it-takes-to-power-an-industrial-revolution