Disney and Information

One of the themes of the history of technology is how information has become a more and more important aspect of every part of American life.  Yesterday the New York Times had an article about how DisneyWorld is introducing digital bracelets to all its guests that may transform the experience of Disney World.  Guests can use the bracelets to make purchases.  Disney can use the bracelets to track every part of a guest's visit.  (How many times did someone go down Thunder Mountain?)  Is this big brother or a really neat thing that will add to people's enjoyment?   Walt Disney was someone who was very interested in how technology would develop in the future, but I don't think even he understood how central information technology would be. 

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?