This time, let's talk about the suffering that scientific and technological progress has brought to mankind

Author | Hu Yilin (Associate Professor, Department of History of Science, Tsinghua University)

One

I have opened a general history of technology course at Tsinghua University, and in recent years, I have also given many lectures on the history of technology to the public.

One of the questions that this type of course or lecture often faces is: Does the history you talk about guide us? Especially the audience with information technology background, they prefer to talk about the so-called "fourth industrial revolution", and when I say that I want to talk about the era of Watt and Edison, they are concerned that you should talk about the inspiration of the previous industrial revolutions for the current scientific and technological innovation.

I do want to get inspiration from the history of technology to understand the present, which is one of my original intentions in studying the history of technology.

But the "inspiration" I understand is not quite what many listeners expect.

They tend to focus on "innovation", arguing that the history of technology is nothing more than the history of innovation, or that the meaningful part of the history of technology is only continuous innovation.

At present, the problems related to technological development that we are facing are mainly the problems of how to promote innovation.

Of course, I am also concerned about "innovation" and have also made an interpretation of the history of the transformation of innovation models, but this is not what I am most concerned about.

In fact, what we can read from history is far more than the experience of success, but also the memory of suffering and the lessons of failure. It is somewhat similar to "prosperity, the people suffer; death, the people suffer", because even those grand mileage that seem to be "successful", when dissected, its background color is often filled with the suffering of countless ordinary people.

Unfortunately, the history of technology is no exception – it contains only glorious achievements, not any tragedy or suffering.

If we do not read suffering from the history of technology, but are only obscured by their glossy surfaces, it is as if in the ancient historical narrative there were only the emperors and generals who finally won and were talked about by posterity, and the suffering of the people was completely ignored, or only seen as a foil for great deeds.

Innovation is not always a joy for everyone, and the so-called industrial revolution is no more gentle than the political revolution, and under the earth-shaking changes, it also buries countless sufferings.

In the process of technological innovation, those fierce conflicts and heavy costs can also bring us "inspiration" - not to inspire us how to innovate, but to inspire us how to face innovation.

Two

Carl Benedict Frey, a well-known Swedish economist and economic historian, "The Technology Trap: From the Industrial Revolution to the AGE of AI, Capital, Labor and Power under Technological Innovation" focuses on the workers who have been run over by the wheels of technological innovation and the "losers" in the process of the Industrial Revolution.

In order to "learn from history" and inspire us to understand what is happening or will happen in the current process of artificial intelligence revolution.

This is first and foremost a work on the history of technology, the Chinese translation of the recommended words write "a long period of analysis of 300 years of history", in fact, Frey spanned a longer era, he wrote from the Agricultural Revolution - similar to the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution is of course great and beautiful from a long time point of view, but in the eyes of the people at that time, the quality of life was reduced.

From the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to automation and artificial intelligence, history is moving forward but reverberating.

Frey pointed out that the Industrial Revolution was marked by the development of "labor-saving technologies", which were designed to replace workers' labor rather than enhance their abilities, which were not popular in ancient times, because labor-saving technologies would cause workers to lose their jobs. There are two types: "substitution technology" and "enabling technology".

"Replacing technology makes jobs and skills redundant. Instead, enabling technology will help people complete existing tasks more efficiently or create entirely new job opportunities for workers. Writing, mechanical clocks, printing, etc., are typical "enabling technologies", and they are not so much reducing labor as they open up more labor space and make more and richer work possible.

Substitution technology, purely for the purpose of reducing labor, was unpopular, and it was not until the 18th century that the development of substitution technology was sufficiently supported in the unique political and cultural environment of Britain.

The full development of alternative technologies has indeed brought suffering to society. As Engels observed, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, industrialists "became rich by the misery of the broad working class."

In the first 40 years of the 19th century, workers' wages grew slowly compared to increasing productivity, and workers did not benefit from industrialization, given the deterioration of their labor intensity and quality of life. After 1840, however, the situation began to improve, and real wages grew faster than productivity.

Frey believes that this is due in part to the gradual emergence of the "enabling" effect of new factories, and on the other hand, it depends on the popularization of education, which eventually allows people who learn more skills to find more jobs.

Of course, those who suffered in the early 19th century did not get these new opportunities.

Workers who were able to exchange high-intensity work for low wages may not have suffered the most, and in the eyes of the people at the time, a child from a poor family could find a job in a textile factory for 18 hours a day, which may be considered a "blessing".

Even some inventors will justify the "creation of jobs for women and children" as a way to justify the unemployment of skilled workers caused by machines.

More adult workers are unemployed, they can't find a livelihood, they can't see hope, even if they can predict the prosperity of the industrial age in 50 years? Not to mention that they see no hope in the progress of the machine.

Three

When my general history of technology class talks about the Industrial Revolution, I always mention the proliferation of child labor and the rise of Luddism.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, more and more craftsmen's jobs were replaced by machines, and the work of supervising machines required very few people, and they did not need skilled skills, and children could do it. As a result, a large number of prime-age laborers face unemployment, some of which point the finger at the machines that take away their jobs, which forms the "Luther Movement" that destroys the machines.

After this passage, some students asked: Where did the unemployed end up? This is a good question. After reading this history, many people no longer care about the fate of these people, and they are regarded as the pain of the revolution and have been brushed aside.

In the grand narrative, industrialization soon brought unprecedented prosperity to human society. But if you go back to the context of the time, the so-called "short-term labor pain" may be a lifetime or even a generational thing for an individual. Although new technologies are constantly creating new jobs, on the one hand they may not be able to wait for new jobs to emerge, and on the other hand, they lack the skills to adapt to new jobs compared to younger generations.

Their land in the countryside has long been lost, and the destination of unemployment is to scavenging or wandering, and they will end up in old age, so that their life expectancy will not reach old age.

"There are three generations of British workers whose plight has deteriorated with the rapid development of technological creativity," Frey said. Those losers did not live today to witness this great prosperity. The Luddists were right, but later people can still be glad they didn't get what they wanted. ”

Why care about these victims? First, of course, out of sympathy — these people themselves have not made mistakes, who have worked diligently but suddenly lost everything, who have no hope of reversing their destiny, and who have reminded us that they may become such victims at any time; secondly, humanity should be put above technology — and we celebrate progress and innovation because technology can bring benefits to humanity.

If the more advanced technology is, the more suffering human beings are, then what reason do we have to support innovation unconditionally?

The above reasons may be just some "big truths", and some people may not be "cold". But even politicians cannot ignore the political power of the Luddists.

If the demands of the victims of technological progress remain unresolved, they may adopt more radical solutions.

Frey noted that in Germany, where unemployment was high in 1933, one of the promises to help the Nazi Party win votes was to restrict machines, and "there will never again be a case where workers are replaced by machines."

Frey also argues that the recent increasingly pronounced political polarization, the rise of populism, Trump's popularity with the white working class, and even the resistance to globalization are all related to the development of automation technology.

We are in a situation similar to that of the Luddists, except that the history of the Industrial Revolution has endorsed the meaning of technology, so much so that people today no longer point their resentment at the machine itself, so they have to set up other targets – American workers think that globalization has robbed them of their jobs.

Four

Just as the Luddists ultimately failed, the rifts and conflicts of contemporary society may dissolve as technology evolves, but the question is, how is this achieved? What do we need to do to this? In this regard, we can still look to history for inspiration.

In Frey's view, the so-called "second industrial revolution" led by the United States in the second half of the 19th century reversed the face of the first industrial revolution, on the one hand, creating a large number of new jobs for ordinary people, on the other hand, it also allowed industrialized products to enter thousands of households, improved people's lives, and thus dissolved people's hostility to technology.

From the 1870s to the 1870s, and especially the first 70 years of the 20th century, which Frey called the "greatest period of equilibrium," all incomes rose and the gap between rich and poor tended to narrow.

Frey agrees with other economic historians that this "great equilibrium" owes primarily to the "competition between technology and education." Of course, he did not rule out many other factors, such as the development of trade unions, changes in macro policies, the development of technology itself, etc., but he believed that education was the most important area.

After 1970, the situation reversed, with workers' wages stagnating and inequality rising. Frey believes that an important factor is the development of automation technology supported by computers.

Frey emphasized, "We must distinguish between the age of automation and the age of mechanization. "The computer revolution is not a continuation of the mechanized revolution of the 20th century, but a subversion of it." Computer-controlled machines eliminated the job of machine operator created by the Second Industrial Revolution. Workers who were once drawn into mass production for decently paid jobs are now being pushed out. ”

Just as the first industrial revolution was ultimately balanced by the second industrial revolution (electrification), can the so-called third industrial revolution (automation) also be balanced by the fourth industrial revolution (such as artificial intelligence technology)? The situation is not necessarily so optimistic, in fact, many AI technologies seem to be tending to "replace" rather than "enable".

We can't wait for the rabbit, we need to take the initiative to deal with the challenges of the automation era. Taking history as a mirror, Frey prescribed a number of prescriptions in specific areas such as education, retraining, insurance, and tax policy.

Regarding Frey's specific assertions and specific policy recommendations, I do not agree with them in their entirety.

For example, I think that marked by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the modern credit money and financial system is the key factor that led to the increase in the gap between the rich and the poor after the 1970s, and Frey does not mention the Bretton Woods system at all, and only mentions the financial factor, thinking that financial policy can only explain the situation of the top 1% of the rich and cannot explain the situation of the middle class, but today the wealth of the top 1% of the rich in the United States has exceeded the sum of the middle class, how can this 1% have nothing to do with the situation of the middle class?

In any case, the vision given by Frey is broad and inspiring, and he fully demonstrates the practical significance of the history of technology.