The basic premise of the article (that there are three distinct industrial revolutions with "fallow" periods dividing them) seems to me to be very easy to poke holes in. It's not as if some fundamental force of innovation switched on in 1760 and then faded away in 1830, only to reappear forty years later, as the graph in the article implies. Historians of globalization have been thinking about this stuff in a different way for quite some time now (for instance, Jan de Vries and his concept of a 17th and early 18th century "Industrious Revolution" is quite influential and has a lot of merit in my opinion).
It also isn't clear to me why the author(s) consider the automation of the 19th and 20th centuries, which they allow to have demolished entire industries and ways of life, to have been less threatening than the present wave of automation. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that the people who write and read the Economist were those who benefited from the disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries--and are now in a position to rationalize away their negatives--than with any qualitative shift in how innovation or automation is taking place.
Industrialization in 19th and 20th centuries caused suffering in the transition period (1st industrial revolution resulted decrease in average height and drop in expected lifespan in Britain) and the public was able to fully enjoy the benefits of the industrialization only after massive political struggle that included violence (revolutions, unions, strikes, assassinations). The end result was society with new laws and new systems for wealth distribution.
If we look into history for cues, industrialization should be seen as two step process:
1. New technology brings new opportunities and makes economy more efficient. It also changes power structures in the society and creates massive imbalances.
2. Dramatic technological changes are followed with equally dramatic changes in society that either happen trough political struggle or violence.
The one thing a magazine like The Economist won't dwell on is the wars that these sorts of disruptions have triggered in the past.
Wars like the French and American revolutions were fueled by an upheaval in weaponry and technology that rendered arrangements like feudalism obsolete. Primitive phalanx and cavalry style engagements could not suppress ordinary commoners anymore, if they had enough muskets and gun powder.
With wars like the American Civil War and both World Wars, we saw total war emerge. Mass production, mechanized logistics and air power were added to the mix and effectively destroyed all traces of overt slavery and royalist monarchy, wherever heavy weapons technologies saw wide implementation.
So what's next? Full Spectrum War sounds ominous, but even that seem like it's probably just Total War's pocket watch dressed up as a calculator wrist watch...
What's next? Drones. No matter how strong one's industrial base, warfare has always been limited by the number of boots on the ground. Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.
There will be no flag-draped coffins to discourage a nation with a fully automated army. War will become a purely financial drain. As technology advances and drives drone costs to the price of raw materials, the drain will lessen while destructive capabilities grow.
These factors could drastically increase the amount of warfare in the world. I'm not sure how probable this scenario is, but it worries me.
Well, you're not gonna target the drones. You'll want to destroy the enemy's ability to control those drones, or their ability to build and maintain them.
Or, more realistically/cynically, you want to PRETEND that's what you're doing, when you're actually targeting major population centers in order to terrorize the enemy into surrendering (as used in WW2 by the USA against Japan, Japan against China, Germany and Britain against each other, etc...)
And simply disengaging when you decide you've had enough is a luxury that the USA and USSR have enjoyed in their proxy wars. Americans haven't had to defend their homeland in over 200 years now, and it seems a very skewed view of the horrors of war resulted from that. If war is nothing but a drain on resources to you, you're not so much fighting as you are trying to mug someone who can't really fight back.
> Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.
That seems to me to be quite an oversimplification of what wins wars. Every war tech has had edge cases that motivated adversaries managed to overcome.
For example, despite the Vietcong's gross disadvantage in terms of technology, it's leaders managed to force over time the US's withdrawal. We didn't run out of men. We ran out of political will. The battle over political will is vastly different than the battle to save and destroy men. The Vietcong eventually came to realize this and optimized their strategy around it, and none of our horrific technological marvels could defeat that tailored strategy.
In fact, if you're just looking at body count, the North Vietnamese should have lost before we withdrew. We optimized around body counts but were unable to attain our military goals. These days, men won and lost are, if not the least of our concerns, are definitely not the most.
I think you misunderstand me. The sides can have different thresholds for "too many body bags." The american threshold was lower, because the americans weren't fighting in defense of their homeland. Had the war been a purely financial expense for the US, they would have stuck around for much longer.
Body counts have nothing to do with it. There's no 'differing threshold', even if it might look that way, if that's the only data you have available to you.
A democratic nation-state fights a war in a very different way than one without such sophistication. The American political will to fight arises out of its sense of justice and duty. We really believed we were fighting for freedom. Until it became abundantly clear that we weren't, we were happy to throw men and money into the meat grinder for years upon years.
A non-democratic nation fights for as long as the person directing the war maintains his ability to do so. That is the key difference between a western power and an emerging nation. We've got beliefs that can be orchestrated into terrific displays of force, other nations have to coerce the means to project force from the people somehow.
It's what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. As long as most Americans believe that what we are doing there is right, we'll keep at it no matter what. Oh we might pour more or less money into it, adjust our military footprint, but we're going to keep fighting the good fight for as long as we believe that it's the good fight. That belief is robust, it will resist attempts to dislodge it, the same way that a person's irrational beliefs aren't simply changed.
The Vietcong eventually came to realize this. They used their dwindling resources to stage attacks, not where they were needed militarily, but where they would be filmed. The culmination of this strategy was the Tet Offensive, which was carefully orchestrated to look far more large-scale, at least on cameras, than it was. It was an amazing feat, and it accomplished exactly what it had set out to, to tip the balance of public opinion against the war. Militarily, it was a failure, none of the attacks went anywhere and the fighters faded back into the jungle as quickly as they emerged.
It wasn't anything like how many soldiers we lost that caused us to pull out. It was the public perception of how the war was going, what we were doing there, where it was going.
You say it like it's something men would want. "I'm eligible for being shipped overseas to kill or be killed. Yay for me."
You're worried about what drones will do to warfare?
Imagine you're a psychopath ruler of say, 320 million people, you have a massive fleet of killer drones at your disposal and you're electronically monitoring everything your subjects do. There's an old piece of parchment that says you can't be naughty, but you've already "normalized" violations of its rules, and hey, it's not like text on a piece of paper actually binds you in any way - you're the ruler after all.
Suppose that you don't really feel like giving up your power, even after you've completely destroyed the economy. The masses of human livestock on your tax farm are understandably upset about not being able to secure work, food or shelter. Can you think of ways to use your fleet of killer drones for maintaining your position in power?
"even after you've completely destroyed the economy.... Can you think of ways to use your fleet of killer drones for maintaining your position in power?"
It is worth pointing out something that a few modern-day tyrants have already discovered to various degrees, which is that the tools of modern oppression require modern economies to keep functioning. If the economy is "completely destroyed", the drones aren't working either. They require power, maintenance, replacement parts, replacement drones, technicians to manage the gear who will need to be fed (and who will be in a position to turn on you), etc. Mind you, small comfort, but a bit of one.
There's nothing preventing the inputs required to keep the drones going - power generation, parts, repair, etc. - being automated exactly the same way as every other facet of our economy is being automated.
If we're to the point where that level of automation has been achieved, it will not be drones in the sky that are your biggest problem. I'm sticking in the forseeable future here, not near-Singularity future.
More hypothetically for me now; horribly immediately for some in Pakistan and Palestine.
But you know how technology goes, especially this kind of technology, it won't be long until everyone has drones. And I don't think any of us will be immune from being victims either.
Even just from a self-interested position, if the U.S. were smart we'd be pushing for international treaties against the use of militarized drones. Just like international treaties against chemical weapons. In both cases, they make warfare just too horrible, and the only way to minimize their use is to make clear international norms that put them beyond the pale.
Of course, instead, we won't even sign the anti-landmine treaty. And are setting an example of maximizing use of militarized drones. One gets the feeling the current governments of the U.S. in the current context wouldn't have agreed to anti-chemical weapons treaties either, if they had a do-over.
> Currently cruise missiles are among the most expensive of single-use weapons, up to several million dollars apiece. One consequence of this is that its users face difficult choices in targeting, to avoid expending the missiles on targets of low value.
That's one distinction. What makes drones scary is how they can be, and are being, used to terrorize entire populations, in ways that cruise missiles have not been and are unlikely to be.
Not that cruise missiles aren't terrifying too, but the affordability and perceived 'precision' of drones is leading to an entirely new scale of un-manned warfare.
Also, drones increasing autonomy, in a way that cruise missiles have not been and are unlikely to ever be, is another distinction.
Drone War seems like it will tend towards the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon", no one wants to go nuclear, and no one wants direct confrontation with boots on the ground, so fleets of drones will fight it out and bomb strategic and tactical targets with conventional weapons while the civilian populations can do nothing but count the destruction.
> Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.
More accurately, eventually one side perceives the cost of continuing as outweighing the expected benefits. Battlefield casualties are usually a significant factor in generating that perception, but other costs are also often factors, and more importantly shifting perception of what can actually be achieved by continuing the war is usually a factor.
> There will be no flag-draped coffins to discourage a nation with a fully automated army.
Only true if the other side exclusively targets the automated army. Which is one reason that won't happen.
You don't need a sky full of drones to attack another country that has an army of drones. You need only a nuclear warhead delivered via cargo container to a strategic port by cargo ship.
That's just a scaremongering clishé, in reality you don't need anything other than good old TNT or a lot of magnesium to cut the ship in half.
Blow the port. You have just wrecked at least a digit percent of that nation's GDP, the cargo ship (net present value of its production capacity loss), especially if you can manage to get your container at the bottom of the stack, you disabled the port (if you blow it in a narrow place you cut off the port until they remove the wreck and/or dredge a new deep enough way).
And even if you don't achieve any of this, do it a few times and insurance premiums will rise considerably, people will be demanding "ACTION", and so on.
Of course, in a war, effective home propaganda can stifle these sentiments and you might be shooting yourself in the foot indirectly if you turn the civilian population against yourself.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by
small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of
Lisa Simpson"
Nuclear mutual assured destruction put an end to total war.
To see what's next, we should look at what's happening in the present: deniable war, secret war and proxy war. What's going on in Ukraine, for example? There's all these Russian speaking guys in Russian military gear going around, but they're not officially Russian military.
The conflict and associated sanctions are made more complicated by the gas pipeline. Europe can't afford to stop buying gas or half of eastern Europe freezes to death. But Russia can't afford to stop selling gas or they run out of money.
In some ways having half your industrial supply chain in "enemy" territory is a great incentive to avoid war.
Similarly anyone following the conflict in the middle east who can determine who's on "our" side or even accurately enumerate all the parties involved deserves some sort of prize. Is this kind of ultra-local ultra-fragmented conflict likely to spread? Is it likely to acquire cheap hi-tech microdrones or similar?
Also education, printed books (Martin Luther), non clerical academia, new foods and farming methods (potatoes!), trade wealth. The invention of the company. Colonialism.
We feel a need to put a sort of narrative on these things, but thing develop as a mesh. There is a lot focus on labour replacement technologies this year. But, it could easily be that the technologies historian look back on will be communication technologies. The formation of a global human culture interacting more intimately with each other than Illinois was with Louisiana when the Beatles first said all you need is love.
Who knows what the future brings. Maybe it brings peace and brotherhood.
In fairness, even prior to 1900, quite a lot of people were upset at these sorts of changes, at least when it was their particular livelihood on the line; consider the historical Luddites, for example. Or the subculture behind the tale of John Henry.
When I was in elementary school, I distinctly remember an optimistic perspective in response to automation of labor. Now, I highly doubt that children are being taught that this is a good thing and it seems to be mostly doom and gloom (although perhaps I'm just too separated from this point of view, having no children myself).
What changed? Certainly people during the past industrial revolutions were not all optimists, especially in the time before unions when labor was considered almost 100% disposable. But in the last few decades, hasn't there been some shift in what we expect out of this "new wave"?
I think about this almost daily, and all I can come up with is some sort of improved welfare system that depends on a very cheap, automated production of food. And I imagine we will have to shift (already!) back to single-earner households as the economy just isn't made to provide so many jobs anymore. If anyone could point me in the direction of some actually decent reading material on the topic I would be grateful.
Retirement is culturally new and also is no longer something you do right before you die, but if you examine the numbers, soon a rather large fraction of the population will be retired.
Much as childhood used to mean short manual labor on the farm or sweatshop factory, but now means sitting in school for 20 years.
I find it highly likely that both ages will grow toward the middle, and much as joining .mil and being a soldier is seen as a young person's game, or dare I say being a software developer is seen as being a young persons game, everyone will "get used to" the idea that you only work from age 30 to 40, perhaps. Sit in school, maybe national service, raise your kids, until maybe 35, then retire at 45. If everyone (at least female) has kids in their 20s, that means we wouldn't need much if any day care, and we'd be retired in time to play with / supervise grandkids.
Culturally I bet we'd see a bifurcation of work. "real work" would be what grunt labor still exists, stereotypical millwright work on robots at industrial plants, and writing boring TPS reports and CRUD websites. AKA "the grind". Retired work would be passive income lifestyle businesses and arts n crafts. Personally I'd probably go full on FOSS development rather than everything being the property of my employer. My grandmother would likely go full on knitting, selling $400 sweaters similar to but better than the ones at Nordstroms. My wife seems to enjoy traveling and as a FOSS guy all I need is a place to charge my laptop and the occasional network connection so I'm good with that. I would imagine no small number of people would get really into religion, exercise, watching youtube videos...
A lot of people are talking about "basic income" as a solution. Just give everyone a fixed amount of money each month, without means-testing. Then maybe the machines can make the world a utopia for everyone, instead of having a few people at the top who own everything while the masses are desperate.
Personally I think we should pay for it, initially, with a carbon fee, and kill two birds with one stone.
At some point you get a small amount of very rich people with a large pile of very cheap stuff that they cannot sell as nobody else has any money and even if they did, the marginal cost of producing the stuff is less than the cost of running a market to sell it in.
This is around when they start giving it away, in the hope that the enhanced livelihoods they generate frees the next generation of entrepreneurs to create even better uses for their capital.
At some point we get The Culture. Or so the hopeful prognosis goes...
Having recently read the entire series, I'm of two minds when it comes to that scenario. Part of me thinks that it can't come fast enough, but the other part knows that without faster than light travel it's nearly impossible; without a way of gaining more space to live in, pressures on living space will become the source of our conflict even if the capitalist economy as we know it today has broken down...
That assumes we keep growing at O(n^3). Certainly we're doing that now, and may well continue, but it's not clear to me that it's guaranteed. Certainly there are places where the birth rate is below replacement.
What's to stop them from selling it to each other? Could we see a completely stratified economy, with rich people selling each other the fruits of their automated factories' labour?
There's challenges: high-end luxury goods that are totally mass produced don't tend to go together, as it feels too "mass market" or low quality (Ferraris have hand sewn leather in the seats, so they are high quality/"feel authentic"). Apple combines mass production with high end pricing/high quality successfully, but they seem to be an outlier to an extent.
The number of ultra high end consumers is by definition quite small, so there's considerations if a company or brand wants to grow beyond the high end of the market.
You've described feudalism / serfdom with the sole exception that their "factories" were staffed with what boils down to slaves rather than robots.
It wasn't a paradise for the psuedo-slaves, doesn't matter if you call them serfs or not.
One interesting aspect to think about is if 0.1% of the population owns everything and all they do is trade the output of their factories, they won't have much use for almost all of the worlds land and no interest in almost all of the worlds population. They'll really like the worlds resources until technology makes that irrelevant due to solar or fusion or refining everything out of the ocean or nano-assemblers or whatever.
By analogy, in plains grassland regions, for centuries your worth as a human and a measure of your power was the number of horses you owned. Now, almost nobody owns horses and nobody cares how many horses the hobbyists own other than a small separate distinct subculture of horse people. I had a professor and have a cousin who are horse people, its a respectable, time consuming, mostly harmless, expensive hobby that no longer determines your worth as a human being or worth as a leader or your power over other humans. Anyway the analogy with capital is obvious. When you don't need capital anymore, its worthless other than to tiny subcultures of hobbyists. Very soon, collecting capital will be like collection kerosene lamps, or at most its like collecting antique furniture. People who are into it will be deeply into it and hyper competitive amongst themselves with all kinds of crazy ways to keep score and dominate each other and 99% of the population simply won't care and won't participate. Its vital to realize that most hobbies used to be someones business model, their income stream, their way of life, the millstone around their necks, the core of the economy. Now they're just something eccentric people do instead of watching "Survivor" on the couch like a good American would do. And thats the inevitable future of capitalism. As an eccentricity, I think capitalism might be an OK hobby for the occasional weirdo in a post-capitalist world.
Need to find a way to feed ourselves, organize ourselves, and trade human services among ourselves without capital although with a currency of some sort, because none of us will have any capital at all other than the weirdo hobbyists still into that ancient stuff. So... self replicating solar powered factories that make self contained solar powered hydroponics gardens, like a futuristic makerbot squirting out a futuristic aerogarden, and I trade bitcoins with friends on poker night or for arts/crafts or services.
To some extent you see this already. What does SV care about developers outside SV? Oh nothing you say? Well then, its already happening. What do neocons say about people who are permanently no longer part of todays economy? They don't care at all? Well then. They're not evil, just don't care. Like asking the horse people I know how important jet-ski's are to them, what do you think they're going to say? Everyone else is cool with that, at least as long as they still have bread and circuses and a roof of some sort over their heads, and none of that is going to require capital anymore, which is good, because none of us will have capital anymore, either by choice or not.
Interesting writeup. I worry that the transition may be more violent. Will those who are driven to have everything be happy if anyone else has anything? I don't know. What makes some people who have tens of millions hunger for billions? I only posed the question because I'm curious what other people's thoughts were; I think we need a fundamental shift in how we allocate resources when the production of resources is relatively decoupled from labour, which in some regards it already is.
Incidentally, if you find subcultures that place a high degree of value on the horse interesting, you might like this:
A better breakdown of economic waves / technological transitions comes from Robert Ayres, see his "Technological Transformations and Long Waves", February 1989:
Ayres defines five technological transformations. The period of most significant change came with the third, spanning roughly 1870-1890 (with further refinement of major inventions since). I'd argue that the rate of transformation has slowed since.
5. 1975-present: Ill-defined. Slowing innovation, growing economy, declining industrial activity in the US, growing prevalence of computers.
Note that Ayres was writing in 1989, immediately prior to the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. Though these have revolutionalized information access and communications, their overall influence on everyday life has been less profound.
> Note that Ayres was writing in 1989, immediately prior to the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. Though these have revolutionalized information access and communications, their overall influence on everyday life has been less profound.
Couldn't disagree more. The impact of computers was huge but it was mainly in making more efficient the stuff that we were already doing (that's why all the big players benefited from it). What we're witnessing with the Internet since the 2000s is a paradigm shift that can wipe out entire industries (for example with digital distribution, peer to peer and sharing economy).
Yes, the scale at which _some_ industries are performed is changing, especially those based entirely on information access (e.g., travel agents).
But that's often even larger single-point monopoly point of control: Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Banking would be another instance.
What's changed is that while there are still tremendous economies of scale, the holder of that control point has far less security in their tenancy.
Yes, the changes for those directly involved in these firms -- founders, financiers, and the relatively small numbers of employees -- are fairly large.
But at the level of everyday life, the benefits are still pretty slim.
This is a poor article about an important subject. A more useful way to look at it is to make lists of jobs humans can do, and those which machines can do better. Over time, the second column grows. The first column, not so much.
What's different this time is that computers are so general purpose, and so cheap. If a computer can do it at all, it can do it more cheaply than a human.
I think this type of analysis is blind to new jobs that neither humans nor robots are doing now.
For example, right now only humans can do complex computer programming, whereas machines do most farming.
But if you went back to the time when quite a few people were employed as farmers, they would have no concept of what computer programming is, or how an economy could value and reward such skills.
They wouldn't know to put it in either column, so they too would feel terror at the idea of machines taking their jobs, because they could not possibly know about the new industries that drive job growth today.
Likewise, I would not bet against the possibility that new industries and jobs will be made possible in the future by automation that is being built today.
I'll hazard one guess: personalized genetic consulting. Genetics are incredibly complex, incredibly powerful, and highly personal. Given the right advances in computing technology, biotech automation, and energy, it could be possible to employ millions of people as a new kind of service provider--one who analyzes your personal genetics and crafts highly personalized plans to optimize your health. Basically, a biological analog to our modern concept of a financial advisor (which is itself a fairly recent development for most people).
There is a contextual difference, at least, between betting on there not being new opportunities available, and trying to avoid relying on new opportunities being consistently available. Even so, an interesting post - upvoted.
I'm not really on board with either the doomsayers or their reassuring don't-be-a-luddite adversaries.
OTOH, It think statements like "capitalism itself may be under threat" are not necessarily nonsensical. Our world is changing incredibly fast. People in their 30s went to school without computers. People in their 40s started work without computers. People in their teens have grown up using the internet as a semi-integrated part of their brain.
That's slightly hyperbolic I suppose, but it isn't nonsensical. The impact of technology on labour markets is profound in a way that genuinely challenges primary cultural institutions, like the concept of your profession. If you are a social media manager in 2014 what will you be doing in 2044?
Who TF knows where cultural institutions need to go to keep up with the changing realities of this world. Capitalism, representative democracy, education, family. These are all institutions that will need to find a way to survive.
Apologies for asking a question unrelated to the message of the article, but I'm a bit confused by the use of 'discomfited' in the first sentence. From my understanding, 'discomforted' seems more accurate, and is a more commonly used word anyways.
Do I misunderstand the difference between discomfit and discomfort, or did they use the wrong word?
EDIT: I suppose it might just be a matter of wanting to come across sophisticated. At a later point the article uses 'insoluble' where 'unsolvable' would've been perfectly fine and probably easier to understand for most people.
I couldn't find the author name on the page, but this choice of words seems to indicate that (s)he has a French background. "Insoluble" and "Déconfit" are french words, and "Insoluble" is a relatively common word.
The author's name is Ryan Avent. From his personal site, it looks like he's from the states and he got his MSc in London. As for discomfit and insoluble, those words strike me as being in line with the Economist's style.
It also isn't clear to me why the author(s) consider the automation of the 19th and 20th centuries, which they allow to have demolished entire industries and ways of life, to have been less threatening than the present wave of automation. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that the people who write and read the Economist were those who benefited from the disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries--and are now in a position to rationalize away their negatives--than with any qualitative shift in how innovation or automation is taking place.