“How do you hunt a bear in winter? Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13th Warrior
I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points. I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)
Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®: “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”
In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point. Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.
This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record. Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.
I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.
I saw a mammoth singing Calypso. His name was Hairy Elephante.
Other examples include:
- writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
- organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
- agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.
Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier. These changes fundamentally changed society.
The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing. Oh, and taxes. Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.
Ouch.
The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes. So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.
The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment. The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.
But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible. Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap. Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change. Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution. Oh, and child labor.
What’s short, tired, and very profitable? Child labor.
Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:
In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts. This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well. It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.
The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that: cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea. This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”
It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market. Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.
Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim. Arm’s length, at most.
Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide. This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price. Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.
This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted. This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks. Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.
It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible. Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.
I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.
Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts. We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.
Now? We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system. Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:
Intelligence.
Okay, not exactly intelligence. But in certain applications it can do wonders. I had a phone call with my credit card company. The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English. Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy. Peggy was able to answer my final question.
How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb? Don’t know, the jury is still out.
A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.
This is just the beginning. I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.
Heart surgery soon? No. Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?
Yes. And artists? They’re now competing against free.
I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog. Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)
And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos. If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.
But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away? The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.
This is a calculation, not a blind guess. In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why. Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.
Nah, it’ll be fine.
We still know how to make spears.
