Industrial Revolution & the Information Age

 Art is made when there is free time. In ancient civilisation, good yield allowed civilisations to grow culturally, create masterpieces, think, engineer, create republics, start revolutions, and innovate. Most of our history is spent as hunter-gatherers. We controlled fire and had tools made from wood, stone and bone, told stories, mourned our dead and created art. We traded with other tribes. Some hunted big game and were very mobile, others relied more on plants they collected and others mostly stayed in one area with an abundance of seafood. This was the common state of humanity for most of our history. Then, roughly 10,000 years ago, we discovered farming. From a nomadic lifestyle, we settled down, reared animals and when there was time, instead of going for a hunt, we innovated. As a more stable lifestyle was developed, humans began to flourish. More mouths to feed forced farmers to come up with innovative tools that made human work easier and productivity rose.

And then in 1760, started the industrial revolution. We had earlier branched out and specialised in our free time but now all the fields grew. We created the steam engine, established factories, produced secondary items in mass, and there was a steep specialisation in industries. It was an explosion of innovation. While it eradicated old jobs, it made even more new ones. For example, there was the automobile industry. When it was introduced, it abolished the jobs of horse carriages but along with the production of cars, they made various industries like drive-ins, petrol, traffic control, etc. So while it destroyed a few jobs, it gave rise to new industries. Many moved from villages to cities for a better standard of living resulting in congestion and overcrowding. Because of the large number of people in the city, many were left jobless and had to do menial jobs to earn money. A popular example of these jobs was sewer scouring where people worked in dangerous conditions to get trinkets from the sewers. The industrial age was also a huge positive as it replaced most of the primary industries for the secondary or production industry.

When we were farmers, we used to work in the primary sector. With the industrial revolution, we shifted to production jobs and as more and more things became automated, we shifted into service jobs. While the earlier examples of innovation show that it destroys some jobs but creates many better ones, nowadays, the internet allows us a lot of production by less number of people.
For example, At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had 84,000 employees and made $6 billion US dollars in revenue. In 2016, Netflix had 4,500 employees and made 9 billion dollars in revenue.
This is very bad on its own as not as many jobs are being created as they are being destroyed, but we also have a growing population that needs more jobs. So aside from replacing the old jobs, we also need to create new ones for the growing demand.

All this sounds grave, but it gets even worse. In recent years, machines have been taking on more and more jobs. Machines are only good enough to do repetitive factory work but even if we take a hard long look at any job, it is just repetitive sequences of actions. Machines do this via machine learning where they learn by analysing data. This is a problem as humans are nowadays recording everything from Medical Records, Behaviour, Weather, Heart Rates, Communication Systems, Travel data, and what we do at work. Essentially, we have created a huge library for machines to learn how to do the stuff we do better than us.


These may be the biggest job killers of all. They can be instantly replicated, are free to upgrade, and are fast.

This is already happening. Some companies are creating machine learning software that eliminates management positions. They decide the tasks that can be done by computers and which need actual humans. They then assemble a team of freelancers and monitor the work till the project is done. This seems harmless at first glance but the machines examine how the freelancers do their jobs and then learn to do them themselves. This is very cheap for the companies and tends to be the more attractive option.

This can result in a dystopian future where there is a tiny minority of the super-rich who oppress the others or, it doesn’t have to be so grim. If we harness it in the right way, the information age can be used to eradicate inequality