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A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”. Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc. A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head: - In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads. - In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment. - Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal. Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering. |
The question is thus: how do we ensure that the new gains are shared from the start; not "do those gain exist".
The issue with the "Luddistic" approach isn't that it is concerned by the impact of a new technology, it's that it fights progress instead of accompanying it.