How close would you think the Romans were to the industrial age with a big continuous string of good emperors?

The concept of an “industrial age” would have effectively been meaningless to the Romans. They had the steam engine, in toys, but, why would they have wanted to create steam engines to replace slaves with? The Romans liked their economic system based on slavery, that’s what they were used to, and that’s the way they thought things should always be. The Romans made the deserts of North Africa bloom with slave labor, organizing slave labor was what the Romans thought was their purpose in life. The idea of an “industrial age” would have simply been too bizarre a concept for the Romans to even understand, let alone strive for. https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-close-would-you-think-the-Romans-were-to-the-industrial-age-with-a-big-continuous-string-of-good-emperors