Back in the 1700s, cloth manufacturers were dealing with a persistent bottleneck. If you wanted to weave a piece of cloth, no wider than 30 inches, you needed two weavers who sat on opposite sides and spun the yarn into cloth.
Richard Guest, in A Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture, would write that manufacturers who had yarn and orders were constrained in finding "pairs of weavers willing or able to work in close proximity for the 14 hours required."
John Kay saw this and came up with the Flying Shuttle, a hand-loom that could be used by only one weaver pulling a single peg. Suddenly, weavers doubled their productivity — and had to spend time walking around the countryside begging for yarn.
James Hargreaves saw this and came up with the Spinning Jenny, capable of spinning up to 80 threads at once.
The young girl who had been used to the slow and laborious process of the hand-loom found herself standing before two, or even four, of these tireless monsters, watching their every movement. She was no longer a creator of cloth; she was a watcher of threads.
— Harriet Robinson, mill worker
Overcoming Human Constraints
If we look at the historical evolution of the loom, we find a consistent pattern. Each time human cognition hit a ceiling, new innovation was introduced to break it.
Mechanical hand-loom → Flying Shuttle
Hand-spinner → Spinning Jenny
Hand weaver → Power Loom, with humans becoming watchers of threads
Today, if we strip away AI agents to their first principles, we find that they do exactly what the Power Loom and Spinning Jenny did for the weavers and spinners.