The Industrial Revolution made a lot of manufacturing processes much, much more efficient. Before the revolution, you had one manufacturer of everything in every region/village. One blacksmith, one seamstress, one cobbler, one baker, you name it. The Industrial Revolution made large-scale manufacturing possible, freeing up a lot of time for things like education and innovation. Think of it. In today's society, there…
On the contrary, there were a handful of areas where humans had already begun to exploit motion and force outside of human muscle to carry out work. One long-time example is using horses, mules, and other animals to provide force for transporting goods over distances. Even humans were payloads transported upon animal backs. Another key advancement for humans was using water and wind to transport large amounts of goods from one place to another. Sailboats allowed for transporting of goods a very long distance. In today's age we may take self-driving transport for granted, but once upon a time humans actually had to transport goods by hand and foot.
Why the industrial revolution was a powerful next step in exploiting nature is because it allowed not only transport of goods, but also finer, more complex tasks to be carried out without requiring human muscle. Now sewing, grinding, cutting, molding, bending, digging, and drilling could be done by machine in large quantities with good reproducibility.
Hence, first humans exploited nature (and other animals) for transporting goods. Then humans began exploiting oil, coal, and electricity for carrying out more complex physical tasks that require large amounts of force. As machines grew finer, they were able to manufacture smaller, more precise goods.
The next stage was to allow humans to carry out not only large scale physical tasks without continuous human effort, but also to carry out intellectual tasks in mass without continuous human effort. This is where computers come in. They exploit nature to get information processed quickly and reliably.
At least a few areas remain where humans are doing the heavy lifting. One is reproduction. Humans are still required to take care of new humans while they are brought from incapacity to self sufficiency. This is still a difficult, time-consuming task, especially if the goal is having quality output. Another area where humans still do heavy lifting is learning. Unfortunately learning has not become much more efficient or quicker than it was in the past. Humans are very slow at learning, and a massive human effort is generally involved.