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.