 14 percent. Of the active duty force in the uniformed services, 14 percent were female. Of the 39 active duty four-star officers, zero were female. Across the globe in 2007, of our 758 Nobel Prize winners, 33 were female. Of our 793 billionaires with publicly traded fortunes, 78 were female—and of those, six were self-made; all others married or inherited wealth. Of our 500 largest companies, seven had female CEOs. Of our 100 richest nations, three had female elected heads of state. However in 1800, all those numbers were zero. Had Singer, who died in 1875, lived to see how many women’s lives would change, he would have been as surprised as if a butterfly had pulled a knife on him.
Given how synergies have helped shape our labor lives over our past two centuries, what might our near future labor lives be?
In 1850 in the United States, the average work week was around 70 hours; by 1900, the population had tripled, yet the work week had dropped to about 60 hours. In 1900, a year’s worth of food cost an average a year’s worth of food cost an average family about 1,700 hours of labor. By 2000, that effort had fallen by over sixfold. In 1945, a year’s worth of housework—preparing meals, doing laundry, cleaning the house, and such—might have cost an average family about 3,120 hours. By 1975, that time had dropped threefold. From 1900 to 2000, the country’s job market switched from one-quarter to three-quarters professional, managerial, clerical, and sales and service. Thus, in 2006 it had about as many barbers and beauticians as farmers. Even its few remaining farmers weren’t really farmers. They lived on farms, but about 89 percent of their income came from outside farming. From 1900 to 2000, in our presently rich countries as a whole, our average amount of leisure time before retirement rose fourfold. Our average amount of time spent retired rose fivefold. The proportion of us who lived long enough to retire rose sevenfold.
In general, over our past couple centuries, as new tools spread, and the new synergies that they gave rise to locked together, millions of us started shifting from land-as-wealth and bodies-as-wealth to coal-as-wealth and trade-as-wealth.
Many of those changes followed from a tiny few of us trying to pump water out of coal mines in Britain in 1700. Was all that change a one-time thing, or is there anything that we’re doing today that might go on to shape our labor lives in our near future just as much? It’s impossible to be sure, but maybe yes, because we may now be beginning to shift into knowledge-as-wealth and brains-as-wealth.
When it comes to planetary-scale forces, like geology or climate, it’s easy for us to see that we’re in the grip of forces that we don’t control. It may be harder for us to accept that we’re also in the grip of forces that we ourselves create—mostly by accident—but that we still don’t control.
That matters today because network forces didn’t only shape our past; they’re still shaping us today. Because of them, less than a century from now, we may look back and call much of the 1800s to early 1900s ‘The Steam Age,’ and much of the mid 1900s to perhaps the mid 2000s ‘The Computer Age.’
Today, just as with the steam engine centuries ago, one large set of labor changes centers around the computer. One day it will be largely forgotten, just as today the steam engine mostly is, but today’s global network is beginning to do what railroads and steamships began to do for steam engines and mines back in the 1830s—it’s linking computers and brains and thus catalyzing their effects. As a result, a new synergetic network may now be seeding itself. As before, we’re the ones doing it, but, just as with the steam engine, we mostly don’t know what we’re doing, because we don’t know what the outcome of what we’re doing will be.
That similarity may not be coincidence. There’s little really new about computers compared to steam engines because what’s really driving them isn’t semiconductors (or vacuums), but our groups. How they act and react doesn’t seem to change very much whether it’s 1810 or 2010.
Just as with the steam engine, for millennia the computer was an unthinkable thought. Then it abruptly left the dream world and became real. Just as with the steam engine, that happened, first, because it became just barely within our reach, and, second, because of a few local and practical needs—in one case: to aim big guns in a big war. Then, just as with the steam engine, after a while, we figured out a little bit about it and so got better at it, so it began to spread into other niches. In the case of the steam engine, those were what we today would call factory jobs; in the case of the computer, those were what we today would call office jobs. Both kinds of jobs had existed before, but neither was anything like what today’s versions would become.
Again, just as with the steam engine, the computer was a new kind of prime mover—but this time, a mental one. Before it, with one or two minor and recent exceptions, we had only ourselves and our aids. In the mental world we didn’t even have analogs of horses or waterwheels. And today, it’s locked into a development spiral, just as the steam engine once was.
Further, like steam engine performance, computer performance must peak. Thus, computer-powered change must one day taper off. But that’s unlikely to happen soon. Steam-powered change started around 1700 but didn’t end when we perfected large ones around 1800. Nor when we made ones small enough to run on rails and stick on ships around 1830. Nor when we made ones that were even less coal-hungry and even higher-pressure around 1850. Even today, small changes continue in their descendants, steam turbines and Stirling engines. Further, whether those descendants are in coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants, or wherever, today they help generate around 80 percent of all our electrical power. The labor lives that most of us today lead, whether in our rich world or our poor world, would cease to exist without them.
Similarly, in the 1960s a computer chip factory cost around $14 million U.S. By 2010, a new one could cost about $5 billion, or more. And just designing a chip in the first place could cost another couple billion dollars. Such costs can’t keep rising forever. But whenever they peak won’t mean the end of computers. Likely, big ones will then switch to more exotic tech. Instead of using flat chips, maybe they’ll use three-dimensional wafers. Or perhaps they’ll have optical or quantum parts. But whatever tech they use won’t much matter. They’ll still be big and rare and costly. However, by then, small computers will be so tiny and cheap that we’ll weave them into our contact lenses, shoes, clothes, walls, roads, maybe even our food to act as body monitors. They’ll run off of tiny batteries, or solar power, or radio-frequency power, so they won’t need a power plug. And they’ll be dirt cheap—literally. Many of them will also talk to each other. So they could call on the effort of many others, big and small, all around the planet. Pieces of such distributed machines will routinely go dead, but that won’t matter, because other pieces will simply route around them, surviving as a whole as long as they can patch links between themselves. That is almost surely our future.
By then, if not long before, we’ll make our next leap into darkness, just as the steam engine left the world of vacuums and pistons and entered the world of turbines when the electric motor displaced their first prime-mover purpose.
Some of our rich countries already have more computers than people. Billions more are headed our way, far faster than our numbers can grow, even in our fastest growing nations. So, just as with the steam engine, we’re once again producing something far faster than we need to reproduce to keep producing it.
This time, that something isn’t hands, but brains. Of course, we’re far better than our computers at a huge range of mental tasks. But they vastly surpass us at others. And they’re a lot cheaper. And soon they’ll vastly outnumber us.
However, today we still link them about as well as we linked our coal and iron mines back in 1800. Even with today’s orbital comsats and fiberoptics and the like, when pushing data around the planet today mostly we’re still plodding along on the analogs of muddy packhorse trails. We’re still missing two things vital for full synergy: railroads and factories.
By 2015, about three billion of us were linked in a global computer network. But over seven billion of us were alive, so over four billion of us were still out of the loop. However, by 2030, perhaps over eight billion of us will be alive, probably six in ten of us will be urban, and likely all of those will be online—because our computers will by then be vastly cheaper, smaller, far more linked, and they’ll vastly outnumber us. By then, if not before,