I thought a lot about sentences like “The impact of AI will exceed that of the industrial revolution” in the past few months, because I realised that I don’t really know what they mean by that. What is this “impact of the industrial revolution”? How big is it? How would we know whether its impact has been exceeded by AI?
In the best case scenario, the term “the industrial revolution” is used to make two different, and equally justified, points.
- The INDUSTRIAL revolution: An emphasis on “industrial” can be used to point to the relevance of technological inventions and organisational changes involved in what happened between 1770 and 1850. (as opposed to cultural or political or social factors). Wikipedia , for example, says the industrial revolution is a term for “the steam engine and its diffusion”.
- The industrial REVOLUTION: An emphasis on “revolution” can be used to point to the scale of change between 1770 and 1850. (a major social change, amounting to a new order of life (e.g. Carlyle, Wade (History of the Middle and Working Classes, 1833)).
Things can get slippery when the two points are smushed together in one term, that doesn’t choose an emphasis. Marx and Engels, for example, just used the phrase in an absolute, hegelian sense – as if the “industrial revolution” was an objective historical development that doesn’t need any further definition or clarification, simply a name for what really happened between 1770 and 1850, as unambiguous as “the Second World War” or “the Birth of Henry the 8th”.1
If we don’t know anything about the historical context of the industrial revolution, we can end up with a monocausal narrative about what happened between 1770 and 1850, that starts with the steam engine and other technologies and ends with “revolutions of all kinds”. Monocausal narratives can lead to accounts of the past that are either trivial, or incomplete to a ridiculous extent.
- The trivial version goes: “In the late 18th and early 19th century, people invented some technologies, like the steam engine. People used them to make things and buy things. Technologies enabled some people to do things and that mattered for what happened during this time. Some people also did things that mattered without using any of the new technologies. Some other people, in other parts of the world, could not use those technologies to make or buy the same things. What these other people did or didn’t do, or could or couldn’t do, also mattered.”
- The “ incomplete to a ridiculous extent” version goes: “The steam engine and associated technologies caused every single major historical event in the preceding 80 years all by themselves. Once they were invented, humans had no power over them, humans just stood there and watched as the machine gods of progress took over.”
To be clear: Many people like the “incomplete to a ridiculous extent” machine god version of history. Many historians and philosophers have – in my view – provided overwhelmingly strong arguments for the limitations of this kind of technological determinism. (Heidegger, for example, wrote excellent, but not very accessible, things about the topic, the collection of articles in “Does Technology drive History” is more understandable, and I highly recommend it, but it’s still written clearly for an academic audience. Richard Sclove’s analysis in “Democracy and Technology” is very readable, but their reasoning is shortened and seems somewhat motivated by the “new and better vision” of technology policy that they propose in the later chapters.) Unfortunately, these arguments are often understood as a high-brow pedantic game of “gotcha” – even though there are clearly many understandable, non-ridiculous reasons why people might intuitively gravitate to such stories, even if they are not as frequently mentioned – or explained – in critiques of technological determinisms as they could.
To me, technological determinist views are intuitive for a number of reasons. Firstly, When I look for an answer to the question how something could happen, technologies provide a very salient and satisfying clue. Technologies are built to enable an activity, an event, a process and they’re a tangible physical object. These objects can then be associated with their intended purpose. As a result, it’s easy to imagine counterfactuals around technologies, Markus Aurelius making a call on an I-Phone, or Benjamin Franklin talking to Claude about electricity. (even if Markus Aurelius would not have had anyone to call, or Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have needed to ask Claude about electricity). In many ways, blaming technologies as an enabling factor for how large scale change also feels kinder than blaming a person.
- We also might find it relatively easy to pinpoint the time when a technology “started”, when they were invented, or built, or plugged in. It’s much harder to pinpoint the beginning of other parts of our world – an idea, or an activity, or a story, or a symbol. 2
- Because technologies seem to have such an intuitive “beginning”, and are so closely associated with their intended purpose, they are an understandably intuitive way to divide up the past into different chapters, the results of different technological revolutions, starting with the birth of a tool that enables the proceeding events (and treats the rest of the events are largely coincidental). We might, for example, consider the time of the industrial revolution to be primarily about economic growth and factory organisation and steam engines and power looms – and consider the founding of the United States or the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars as either “downstream” or “irrelevant”.
- One problem with the idea that history can be classified into “technological era’s” is that the invention, production and diffusion of technologies is contingent on decisions by people, with particular goals, and these goals might not always be perfectly “built in” to the technology they develop.
- A second problem is that the past doesn’t actually have eras, it’s just one thing after another, and sometimes, the “damn things overlap”. Cutting up our retelling of the past into eras is a purely rhetorical instrument to get people to pay attention to a particular aspect of that past. (In the same way Taylor Swift divides up her career into different albums, and Karl Marx divides up the past (and future) of human life into a feudal, capitalist, socialist and communist “stage” separated by revolutions, the “technological” story emphasises the importance of technologies that “revolutionised” one era into the next, whether this emphasis is justified or not.)
- A third problem is that actual historical events aren’t “enabled by technologies” in the same way that I can “enable notifications” on my phone. A meteor impact can happen, without a particular actor being“enabled” to intentionally bring it about.3
In some ways, the industrial revolution is a powerful term, because it combines two words we associate with a large level of explanatory power: Industriousness (as in, efficiently creating a particular output) and Revolution (as opposed to, say, a revolt): The night of July 14, 1789, after news reached Versailles of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI famously asked the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: “Is it a revolt?” And La Rochefoucauld replied: “No, Sire, it is a revolution.”
- Marx and Engels both used the phrase, and I think it makes sense, because they clearly liked writing about the world in this poetic “deepity” way: “Class Warfare”, “Imperialist Capitalism”, “Bourgeois Morality”, etc. (See: Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845). ↩︎
- One of my former history professors used to say that “Most of what historians do is argue about how something is actually much older, or far newer than everyone thinks it is.” This exercise of asking about the “beginning” is useful for historians, and arguably, everyone else. The question “When did the United States start” is a prompt for people to think about what we mean by “the United States”. Is the constitution a necessary condition? If yes, which parts of the constitution are necessary? What about the constitution’s application in practice? How did either of those things happen? It’s not necessarily a question that’s valuable because there is an objective right answer, but because it prompts us to think about the world as concretely as possible. ↩︎
- We can argue, of course, that technologies actually also explain the meteor impact, because technologies would have enabled dinosaurs to stop a meteor. These kinds of counterfactuals are, as noted above, easily imaginable: A device that would automatically shoot down meteors before entering the atmosphere would have protected the dinosaurs. We can, indeed, explain any unintended event by referencing the absence of an imaginary automated “protective”-device, but the utility of this explanation is pretty limited. It only tells us things we already know: The meteor impact happened, because noone (or nothing) stopped it from happening. Similarly, we can argue that future events depend solely on what people want and the tools they have at their disposal. That an advanced AI tool, for example, once deployed, will shape the universe exactly according to the “value function” of its user. The difficulty of finding a technical “solution” to the alignment problem provides a clear counterargument to the idea that our values are as fixed or internally consistent as the reward function of an AI system. Another counterargument can be found in the currently observable, undeniably chaotic scramble for which AI companies or governments hope to define the value function of state of the art AI systems. ↩︎
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