The Rise of Human Machines
We create technology to do our jobs, but end up working more — and more like machines
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Recently, I was trying to find a good example of people fearing the machines they made. The dawn of the 1900s came to mind, as it has so often over the past few years.
The period between the late 1890s and 1914, before the world descended into a chaos previously unimagined, had a similar vibe as ours — that of acceleration. Things were moving very quickly, especially when it came to technology.
These decades were at the heart of the second industrial revolution/the great leap forward, a period from about 1850 to 1930. It was one of extensive technological innovation in transport, electricity, communications, and manufacturing. People traveled further, faster. They learned the news more quickly. They worked different jobs, and adopted new ideas about productivity and time — and money. Technological changes were felt at a very personal, individual level (in a different way than say, working in a coal mine 60 years earlier). These changes seemed to signal the potential for a new, better kind of society and with it a new, better kind of…
