Technology and Economic Growth

As we will discuss in History 341, one of the assumptions of the Western world since the industrial revolution is that economic growth will continue forever.  Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern university recently wrote a paper challenging that idea.  While you don't have to read it all, one of his main points was to wonder if this kind of economic growth may be extraordinary in history, and in fact coming to an end in the United States.  (That is something that a President or a presidential candidate is not allowed to say.)   He also put the new technologies that we get so excited about in context.  He makes a distinction between three Industrial Revolutions, with Industrial Revolution #1 being the industrial revolution of the steam engine and the factory, Industrial Revolution #2 being the industrial revolution of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and running water, while Industrial Revolution # 3 was the industrial revolution of computing and information technology.  He asks us to put our money where our mouths are in thinking about such technologies as the IPhone, the IPad, etc. when he conducts the following thought experiment:

A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of IR #2 compared to the subset of IR #3 inventions that have occurred since 2002. You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002.
Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

The Higher Education Paradigm

In class we have been talking about paradigms and changes of paradigms.  A video on this website advances the idea that by the year 2020 most universities will no longer exist in their current form and that tuition as a concept will be gone.  It might be easy to laugh at this as a crazy claim, but it is worth spending some time thinking about it.  What keeps American universities going?  What are their vulnerabilities?  Do you think the American university will exist in its current form in 2020?  Why or why not?

Robots and the Future

We have a strange spectacle going on now.  In the presidential campaign, the biggest issue is jobs and the economy, but neither candidate can really talk about what is perhaps the biggest factor in this issue, the elephant in the room.  And that is technology.  The continual growth of information technology makes it possible to build cheap robots that can do more things and are more flexible, making it possible to do work with fewer employees.  Here is an article from the New York Times that describes this phenomenon in the right historical terms.  One historical analogy that we will be talking about in History 341 is agriculture.  It used to be that agriculture occupied 90% of the population.  Now it employs 2%.  So in a similar way we will see the percentage of jobs in manufacturing and other areas fall.  Philips Electronics has a plant in China that makes electric shavers and one in the Netherlands.  The one in China depends mostly on humans, while the one in the Netherlands uses robots and employs one tenth of the workers for the same level of production.  Foxconn, a Chinese company that employs a million people to produce products like Apple's Iphone, is planning on installing many more robots.  In my time at NC State, I have known many students who have worked at UPS.  The article describes a robot that can pick up packages and put them on a conveyor belt.  The robot uses some technology from the Microsoft Kinect.  Workers can move one box every six seconds.  The company that makes the robots thinks that the robots will be able to handle one box per second.  The robot never gets tired and never files a worker's comp claim.  What is going to happen to those jobs?  And it is going to happen no matter who is elected in November. 

The Piano Graveyard

When we think about technologies, we often think of laboratories or factories where technologies are born, but if we are to think about technologies in a sustainable way, we should also think about how technologies, and specific artifacts die. The New York Times recently had an article about how disposing of pianos has become a relatively big business.  In a capitalist society, we often think about the demand for products growing continually, but some products become less popular over time.  In the US peak piano sales occurred in the early 1900s, at 300,000 per year.  Now the piano industry sells 41,000 a year.  Some of the reasons for the drop in sales are:  the large existing base of pianos;  fewer people taking piano lessons, and more demands on young people's time.  (How many people use a piano at home as an instrument of family entertainment.)  And there isn't even sufficient demand for all the used pianos in existence.  You can't even give them away.  So lots of working pianos are destroyed because there is no demand for them. This outrages some piano lovers, but that is the cold hard economic facts of the matter.

NASCAR: Has Our Love Affair With the Car Ended?

It is an axiom that Americans love cars. And here in North Carolina, we can think of NASCAR as one manifestation that of love. But in recent years NASCAR has been falling in popularity as a sport. This piece by Frank Deford, suggests NASCAR is declining because we don't love cars as much as previous generations do. It is not possible to tinker around with cars in the same way that our fathers might have. We have other things to occupy our time with and spend our dollars on. He also suggests for many people, driving is not fun, it is just a necessary evil to get from point A to point B, and we try to make it less painful by filling it with distractions, such as talking on our cell phone. In the days of the Model T, everyone was expected to be able to fix their car, but now cars have gotten very complicated and also very reliable. It is a common theme in the history of technology that as a technology develops, it gets simpler to use, but maybe the current ease of use of the car means that we don't love it as much.

Machines that Replace Human Skill, Chapter CCXXX

As David Landes has said, one of the key aspects of the Industrial Revolution is that machines replace human skill. This has been one of the key technological trends over the last two hundred years. A recent chapter in it is surgical robots. We think of surgery as one of the critical areas today where we rely on a person's manual dexterity. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a surgical robot, called the Raven. It uses open source software (so people can devise their own routines for it) and it relatively cheap. Would people feel comfortable having a technician oversee their surgery that was actually performed by a robot?

Google Cars--Machines that Replace Human Skill

In History 341 we talked about David Landes's four central characteristics of the Industrial Revolution. One was that machines replace human skill. One of the reasons I think this is important is because it is a trend that may have started with the Industrial Revolution, but is continuing on with particular force today in the Information Age. One particular example of this is Google's efforts to make self driving cars--to take human skill out of the equation. Here is an article about the project, and video of a presentation made by Google engineers.

This has huge implications. We lose something like 50,000 lives a year in automobile accidents. Human skill is very imperfect. The carrying capacity of our highways are based on our reliance on human skill. We need to maintain spacings between cars that are compatible with human response times. All this would change with cars controlled by machines. But it would also require social changes to make it possible. Who would be responsible in the case of an accident? Would we be willing to accept that software problems might cause a certain number of deaths a year?

Driverless cars have been a dream for many years, but the reality has been elusive. Just eight years ago, in a large competition of driverless vehicles, the winning entry was only able to go eight miles. We will talk about this later in the course, but with the progression of Moore's Law, will there be anything left that humans can do better than machines?

The Universities and Technological Change

What do all the technological changes our world is undergoing mean for the university? Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, has a reflection on that, published recently in the New York Times. He notes first of all, the universities are extremely conservative institutions. Some of his thoughts include: less emphasis on memorization, more collaboration, more use of online technologies, and more emphasis on the analysis of data. In the same issue of the New York Times, an article told of a professor at Duke, who has students in her class write blogs rather than research papers. The article has the provocative title "Blogs Vs. Term Papers."

Apollo and Newt Gingrich's Space Colony

Something always seems to come up to link things we talk about in the history of technology to the world of today. This week presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has proposed the United States establish a colony on the Moon. It seems obvious that he did so at this time because the Florida primary is coming up and a renewed space program would create a lot of jobs in Florida. What do you think the Apollo program can tell us about the prospects of establishing a Moon base? It is intriguing (and I think appropriate) that a New York Times article on this subject has the headline "technology is the easy part." This is a reminder that all technologies have to "work" technically, but they also have to work politically and economically.

This also happens to be the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. The Washington Post ran a story on it recently.

Where does your Apple come from?

Where does that Apple product that you have, whether it is a Mac, IPhone, IPod, or IPad, come from? When Apple started, it made all its products in the US; now, it doesn't make anything here. A New York Times article reports on a Silicon Valley dinner last year whose attendees included Steve Jobs and President Obama:

But as Steven P. Jobs spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The article details a number of reasons why Apple prefers to manufacture its products in China. Lower labor costs are just one reason. The Chinese labor force gives Apple a flexibility that it could never achieve in the US. Foxconn, a Chinese company that does most of Apple's manufacturing, has a facility that employs 230,000 people, many of whom live onsite in dormitories. It can respond to changing production needs far more quickly than any factory in America could. To build Iphones, Apple needed 8700 industrial engineers to oversee the process. One estimate was that it would have taken 9 months to find those engineers in the US. In China, it took 15 days.

Apple still designs it products in the US, and provides many highly skilled engineers with good high paying jobs. However it no longer provides high paying jobs to Americans with mid-level skills. Those types of jobs, whether they were auto workers building cars in the 1950s and 1960s or electronics manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, were once one of the foundations of the American economy.

A recent radio show provides a fascinating portrait of Apple's China manufacturing operations. From a history of technology perspective, people once lived in close proximity to where the things they used in daily life were made. They could see the blacksmith making parts they might use in the house. They could see a cooper making a bucket. Now we are far removed from where the things we use are made. Would we be as enthusiastic about using them if we saw how the people who made them suffered? This audio piece has a segment where New York Times columnist Nick Kristof (he and his wife wrote the book Half the Sky, which was a former freshman summer reading book at NCSU), argues that sweatshops, such as Apple uses, actually have helped to raise many people out of poverty. All of this echoes debates about whether the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s and 1800s actually improved or degraded workers' lives.

Success Through Failure

A well-know historian of technology, Henry Petroski, has made the focus of his work how failures in technology can lead to success--ultimately a superior technology. We are now right around the 30th anniversary of the crash of an Air Florida plane in Washington, DC, which killed 77 people. The crash was caused by a variety of problems, but the main issue was inadequate deicing of the plane, which was attempting to takeoff during a snow storm. The Washington Post has a piece describing all the procedures that are in place now which make a similar accident very unlikely. Most of them are not very glamorous--things like checklists, better deicing solutions, and better defined procedures, but they work well. As far as I can tell, the last fatal accident of a major jetliner in the United States was over 10 years ago. (There was a crash of a commuter turbo-prop three years ago.) The history of technology often focuses on the major inventions, when small incremental changes can be very significant as well.

Technologies in Decline: Letter Writing

The history of technology is about technologies being born and growing, but it is also about technologies dying or diminishing. When I went to college one of the highlights of the day was to check one's mailbox to see if there was a letter from home or from a friend. Does anyone still write letters anymore? I had an elderly friend that I lost contact with because she didn't use email, and I don't really write letters. Sometimes technologies enter a death spiral, where as they are less used, they degrade in quality. We can think of that with the Post Office no longer promising next day delivery. Here is a brief piece thinking about the history of the mail and of letter writing and its loss. (Imagine having two mail deliveries a day!) But when we want to know about our past, will we be able to access emails or texts in the same way we can access old letters of our relatives? Letters have been one of the staples of history; what will happen when they are gone? India has a tradition of letter writers, who set up shop outside post offices, offering their services to write letters for illiterate people. Some still work, but many are gone now, as even very poor people are able to afford cell phones and call home on their own. Three years ago, I did run across some letter writers in front of a post office in Ahmedabad, and their picture is above.

Deaths in Technology Last Year: More Than Steve Jobs

While the death of Steve Jobs attracted the most attention, other people died who played fundamental roles in building the world we now live in. The fact that they are almost completely unknown suggests something about the large number of people who make fundamental contributions to technology--it's not just a few people. Dennis Ritchie was one of the two people most responsible for developing the Unix operating system. Unix is the basis for the operating systems on Apple computers, on Android cell phones; it is also the basis for Linux. Ritchie is at least known among computer scientists, while Keith Tantlinger is almost completely unknown. Tantinger worked on making containers and container ships viable vehicles for shipping goods. His specific contribution was a locking mechanism that locked containers to each other and which could be locked or unlocked by a crane operator. It may not sound very glamorous, but our technological world depends on seemingly small, but important innovations like Tantingler's.