Historical technological change and the human mind. Part 3

This will be the final part of our discussion on the way historical technological progress has been shaping our social consciousness. We have finished the previous commentary by demonstrating the emotional attachment that every generation acquires vis-a-vis their particular social world. And we have also noted the tendency of projecting our own subjective sensibilities upon others, thereby erroneously making them universal. But there are no universal and ahistorical social norms, as there is no universal source of happiness. Hence, it is more than merely suspicious that everybody will proclaim their social beliefs to be the ahistorically correct ones. And that they will consider their particular source of happiness as the true source of happiness. Such a stance also gives away one’s intellectual arrogance.

There have been generations that projected their anxieties about women’s suffrage onto their descendants. And yet, these descendants today not only take these political rights for granted, but also ridicule the social limitations of the past. The same applies to technological innovations. Those who happen to experience the impact of a particular device on their social world might feel a sense of trepidation. However, the generations that follow and grow up within the new social reality do not share such consternation. Once again, it would have been intellectually arrogant on the part of their ancestors to assume that future generations would share their own social consciousness.

The last historical example that we have treated was the obsolescence of elevator operators as a result of the invention of automated lifts. Another example of what might now seem like an absurd waste of human labour can be found in the former occupation of telephone operators. Although it may be difficult to imagine today, there was a time when telephone calls were connected manually. Telephone operators, particularly women known as “telephone girls”, played an essential role in early telecommunications from the late 19th century through much of the 20th century.

“In the 1880s and 1890s women telephone operators often served the same small group of customers every day. This created an intimacy between client and customer as customers grew to recognize operators’ voices and know them as people. In many areas, operators could be counted on to have all sorts of information at hand, such as the names and addresses of local customers, the latest news, weather, and sports results, the correct time of day, and even gossip.”

Do we miss this social interaction today? Clearly not. But that is not because such an “intimacy” is inherently troublesome or undesirable. Rather, our technological advances have now conditioned our minds to regard it as futile. Nevertheless, all emotional attachment to a particular social world aside, the invention of the automatic telephone inevitably brought the issue of employment to the forefront. Here is a quotation from 1914:

“If Spokane should substitute automatic phones for all the manual phones now in use in the city, either by a publicly owned or privately owned system, what will we do for the 350 telephone girls who will lose their jobs? This is a serious affair from the viewpoint of these girls and those dependent upon them. That the automatic phone is more efficient and costs less to operate is pretty generally proven. The automatic telephone is just one of the many labor-saving devices that is responsible also for the stupendous problem that is now confronting all civilized nations - the conflict between labor and capital. These telephone girls probably feel toward the automatics as the weavers of England felt toward the power looms a century ago, and as the glass blowers of 10 years ago felt toward the great automatic bottle-blowing machines.”

Once again, these earlier generations were not capable of relativising their historical moment. They were fully invested in their particular era and, consequently, could hardly have considered how absurd their defense of telephone operators would appear to the sensibilities of twenty-first-century society. Neither could they have imagined the more advanced and more useful forms of economic activity that people would perform in the future - in lieu of spending their entire working day in front of switches, plugs, and cables. Therefore, defending what today would be regarded as a pointless waste of human time and energy was seen as worthwhile. Here is a historical example from Sweden:

“One forgotten suffering among others is the discard of operators through a new technical invention, the automatic telephone. It is economic speculation, without compensation, to put the trouble on the public instead, to manoeuvre its telephone calls itself. Where the living workforce, who through this ‘great invention’ is thrown away, shall go is of little concern to us who occupy safe positions. A momentary apologetic sum of money can not replace the lost source of livelihood.”

Consequently, a member of the Swedish Parliament even introduced “a proposition in January 1929 demanding a stop to the further introduction of automatic exchanges.” Would any politician today dare to suggest ditching our smartphones and going back to the times of manual telephone connections? Just imagine how many jobs could be created! However, history and human progress only move in one direction. There is no going back to hand-copying books, to having elevator operators, or to connecting telephone calls manually. And one can only wonder which of today's prevailing economic activities, and how many of them, will become obsolete from the perspective of future generations as a result of artificial intelligence. Our previous discussion of this latest technological revolution can be found here.

To continue the list of historical economic realities that are gone for good, there is likewise no going back to the days when the vast majority of the population worked the land. Not only did this historical shift away from agricultural dominance liberate us from such ideological fantasies as aristocratic privileges and the “divinely ordained order of society”, but it also freed up human labour for other productive activities. For instance, we can now devote a portion of our collective labour time to manufacturing trains, aircraft, furniture, and household appliances, or to providing services in the hospitality industry. And as far as particular technological inventions are concerned, the tractor made a significant contribution to urbanisation.

“Before tractors, there were limits to farming. Farming with horses meant that you could only work until the horses got tired. Days in the field were limited to eight to 10 hours. Somewhere around five acres per horse had to be set aside simply to grow the food for that horse. So there was a practical limit to the size that a farm could be. With a tractor, a farmer could do two, three, even five times as much work in the same time. To put it another way, tractors allowed a farmer to farm up to five times as much ground as he or she could with horses. One ad claimed that ‘One Case Tractor Replaces 12 Horses.’ [...] Before tractors, landowners often had several farmers renting a given parcel of land, farming with horses. When the New Deal agricultural programs began sending checks to land owners, some used the money to buy tractors, then rented them to one of their tenants and told the others they were no longer needed. [...] By the end of the 1930s, there were fewer farmers and those who were left were farming more land.”

That such developments would once again provoke resistance among some contemporaries is hardly surprising. But yet again, this should remind us of the essential historical lesson, namely that one should never overlook the relativity of their particular historical moment. For instance, a British Conservative politician named George Courthope stated in 1930 that he had “the genuine desire to see more people living on the land and by the land.” From our perspective today, what would be the benefits of fulfilling such a desire? A larger agricultural workforce would simply mean less labour available for manufacturing and services. Would lowering our standard of living in this way help address the challenges posed by climate change? Or, perhaps, such material regression could help stall the social progress that our conservative friends are constantly anxious about? But let us return to the actual losses resulting from technological innovation in agriculture:

“To take one single case: the combine (reaper-thresher) wherever adopted deprives five agricultural workers of employment. [...] A tractor operator with a five-bottom 14-inch plough can turn more land in one hour than the same man with a walking plough could cover in a day. Ten days of one man's time are required with a one-horse outfit to cultivate the same acreage that the four-row outfit can cultivate in one day.”

Is spending the entire day toiling behind a walking plough beneficial to a human being in any way? While the monotony of repetitive labour can be psychologically damaging, the loss of physical activity can easily be compensated for through more pleasant means, for instance, by going to the gym. And is it not more beneficial to society to have one worker operating a “four-row outfit” and nine doctors or scientists, rather than ten men working with “one-horse outfits”? Unfortunately, this perspective was unavailable to generations living a century ago.

To conclude, let’s apply these historical lessons to our own time. Let’s imagine that the ITER project in southern France proves successful and humanity eventually becomes capable of replacing existing methods of electricity generation with nuclear fusion. Should we mourn the potential job losses in the existing energy-generation industries, such as coal, gas, wind, or solar power? The fact that we might find it difficult to envisage certain economic activities that will emerge only in the future does not seem to be a reasonable argument for repeating the mistakes of our ancestors. Finally, whether we are talking about AI or nuclear fusion, why not use these potential technological revolutions to drastically reduce our working hours? And if there are any conservative prophets with a “genuine desire to see more people” spending more time at their workplaces, they could simply join the aforementioned honorable George Courthope in the dustbin of history.

Sources:
1. https://ethw.org/Telephone_Operators
2. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1999/apr/20/solution-of-labor-problems-from-the-spokesman/?utm_source
3. https://ex.hhs.se/dissertations/221685-FULLTEXT01.pdf?utm_source
4. https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farming-in-the-1930s/machines/tractored-out/?utm_source
5. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1930-11-18/debates/d8e2863a-742e-4652-b480-610036a4ed30/CommonsChamber?utm_source
6. https://www.lipad.ca/full/1932/02/15/5/?utm_source

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