It's bad form to reply to my own post, but a strong cup of tea has invigorated me with some ideas that follow on from building the first working beam engine.
I'm introducing a second invention, halfway through, because you need something to pump industrial quantities of capital as well as water.
Firstly, you probably won't have the cashflow to purchase another mine and build another engine for at least a decade. Not unless you're mining silver, or there's a severe economic supply contraint on copper, tin, or whatever you're extracting, permitting you to make extraordinary profits.
You will have the cashflow to improve - and probably replace - your engine, your workshop, and your craftsmmen in two or three years.
You now have a business model. No, TWO business models.
Firstly, municipal water supply already exists in the Roman Empire: there's an existing demand for big beam-engine pumps, and you can demonstrate a profitable and reliable working model. Your craftsmen might defect and start up a rival business - if they can get capital (which they can't) or interest a Patrician - but you can let them go, secure in the knowledge that they can only ever copy what you've already done.
They cannot compete with your next technological improvement, or the one after: your emerging commercial rivals are no better than the industrial pioneers and inventors who took decades to develop things that you know completely, a century ahead of their best possible learning-curve.
Your second business model is that you know where the all good ore lodes are, and how to get at them - flooded or not. Even if you don't, mine-owners with a flooding problem are going to tell you where the few known ones are...
...But developing those resources still needs far more capital than you possess; and your objective is to become Emperor, not just a provider of steam pumps to grand patricians with an ore lode, and Proconsuls with a municipal supply problem.
No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company. Lots of wealthy families and merchants would love to have something to invest their money in - Rome's a surprisingly rigid economy, above a certain level of family wealth - and you've got an idea they can see working.
So: get the articles drawn up - and sworn before a Quaestor (and a Vestalis if you want it to be a convincing demonstration of good faith that'll get people killed for suborning or betraying) - and open up another mine.
And another. And a bigger one, with a horse-drawn tramway to move the ore and the coal. Lucky you, knowing the Mass Haul calculation, and the principles of bridge design, soil mechanics, and a simple optical level...
So now you have cashflow, an expanding demand for steel and machine tools, bulk transportation, and coal. And capital.
Sounds like an industrial revolution, right there.
And you're always going to be first with the right technology, at the right time: whatever significant technology anyone else invents - or copies - you will always know its flaws and how they were overcome in subsequent improvement and developments - or how that particular technology was superseded by something far, far better when materials became available.
You also have a substantial political power base among your shareholders: merchants and mid-level patrician families who will, within a decade or two, be wealthier than the entire senatorial class of Rome.
Purple rather suits me, don't you think?
No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company.
You might have infeential distance problems explaining that one.
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.