Be wary of labour-saving devices

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1:57That's what I learnt from the celebrated historian of the Industrial Revolution, Professor Emma Griffin, in this Life Lessons from History episode, along with some helpful observations about how we might deal with the challenges of the AI revolution. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives. Emma, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Hi, thank you. Very well, thank you.

2:35Good. Good to have you on this podcast. When we chatted about this on email, we talked about what you might come up with and we came to a conclusion that the area of conversation, the lesson we would learn is to be careful, beware of labour-saving devices. so that's an interesting thing because that seems a little bit counterintuitive from the get-go surely they're good for us surely labour saving devices uh says on the tin they're good we should embrace them why should we be careful of labour saving devices okay so i'm i'm not saying we we

3:07Emma Griffin:need to be skeptical we need to be worried about them i suppose my question is how much labour labour saving devices really save in the end so i think labour saving devices are part of technology, they're part of progress, they are here to stay, they're not going to go anywhere. I suppose all I want to do is just think a little bit about what happens when we create new machinery that does tasks that previously were taking us a long time and now we've got machines. The kind of obvious logic, and I think particularly in Britain where the Industrial Revolution was taking off in the 18th and the 19th century, there's always a lot of fear that new technology and new machinery would throw people out of employment, they would de-skill jobs, it would leave people without gainful employment, leave them without an income, it would leave them with nothing to do, and it was to be feared in some kind of way.

3:53Emma Griffin:I think labour-saving devices do definitely change the way that we do things, both in the workplace and in the home. So they definitely create change. But what they don't seem to have done, if we take a long view and look back from the 21st century, what they don't seem to have done is turned us all into idle people who are all unemployed and who all have nothing to do. So they change society, but they don't necessarily mean that we work less. So this conversation might be one where we try and understand how that change might impact us, particularly with AI going ahead, which is, you know, what you've just said sounds quite resonant to some of the conversations that we're having today.

4:33Maybe the historical perspective will help us to reflect on that. But let's split this into two bits. We'll talk about kind of the workplace and then we'll talk about domestic environments, shall we? So for the workplace, so labour saving devices in the workplace, we're talking big machines here, presumably, aren't we? So that takes us back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, I guess. What's our sort of chronological framing for that, do you think?

4:55Emma Griffin:We've always used machines. So machines didn't just start with the Industrial Revolution. We've always used lots and lots of machines because machines help us to do things a bit more quickly and a bit more easily. So the spinning wheel is a machine, but it's kind of a pre-industrial machine and that it's quite labor intensive it's quite slow but it is a machine but what really happens with the industrial revolution is you get lots and lots of machines and you get much bigger machines you get a huge number all kind of appearing in very quick succession you know they're more than the sum of the parts if you like it's not just the printing press had been a great invention when it happened but then it didn't kind of spill over into every other area of life and every other area of economic life the industrial revolution there's just so so many changes.

5:38Emma Griffin:The spinning wheel is a great example. It was already a machine. You can spin, you know, what you're doing is you're spinning fibres, cotton fibres or wool fibres, you're spinning them into thread so that you can then weave them or knit them or whatever it is that you're going to do with them. And we've always wanted to do that. And you can do that entirely by hand. The spinning wheel was a great invention that speeded it up and meant you could do it a lot more quickly than you had been able to do it by hand. But you're still only spinning one thread at a time. And one of the great breakthrough inventions, and I think it's a really nice way of kind of thinking about what happens when technology hits the scene, what happens with the, one of the really early inventions is the spinning Jenny, which basically just takes the idea of the spinning wheel, a mechanical spinning onto a spindle.

6:18Emma Griffin:But instead of using just one spindle at a time, it's for six or nine or 12, more than one, basically. That's the goal to do more than one. And so they're trying to design these machines where you spin lots of spindles all at once. So you're still doing exactly the same work, but one person can now do six or nine or 12. Soon the machines get bigger and bigger and bigger. Soon you're doing hundreds. So you're doing exactly the same task, but you're automating it and you're doing it at a bigger scale. All through the Industrial Revolution, there was always this fear that these new technologies would come and they would leave people without any employment.

6:51Emma Griffin:But the one thing that didn't happen with the Industrial Revolution, I mean, some people did lose their employment, but there was always other employment that kind of emerged in its place. So at the same time as having all of these labour-saving devices that make things like spinning so much quicker and so much easier, you also have a great demand for cotton goods and for woven goods. So we're creating more and more things and we're starting to ship them all out other parts of the world as well. But the one thing that didn't happen was that we ended up with lots of people without anything to do.

7:21Emma Griffin:I think that's really the kind of the key standout. Well, let's drill into that for a second, because what you've just described there with the spinning journey is kind of the holy grail of productivity increase, isn't it? Like, you know, you listen to the radio and people are always bemoaning the fact that Britain hasn't got this line on productivity. Whereas you're saying, you know, the job of one person, he can suddenly do 12 persons jobs in one go. What happens to that one person in the industrial revolution? What do they end up doing? Because they're not going and sitting in their room, smoking a cigar.

7:55Emma Griffin:Absolutely. So what happens? So the spinning, you said he, but actually, Originally spinning was, you know, no, no. I mean, it's interesting, but usually the spinning had been done by women at home in their household. And they're not necessarily doing a full working day of spinning. They're getting up, they're getting water, they're making breakfast, they're working in the garden a little bit. They've got some free time in the afternoon. They do a little bit of spinning and it just fits around all the other things that they're doing in the day. You could weave cloth much more quickly than you could spin it.

8:25Emma Griffin:so what you ended up having is weavers who often didn't work full hours because there was a bottleneck in getting the yarn that they needed in order to weave because it was much more labor intensive to do the spinning than it was to do the weaving so what happens when the spinning jenny is invented it starts to move out of the homes it still is something actually the women do but if men start doing it as well because using machinery is always much more manly and men started to work on but often it was women that were working in the factories as well it was both so there was a change there. And so usually it's not the same woman who would have worked a spinning machine who now goes and works in the factory.

9:01Emma Griffin:She remains at home and she might do other household tasks. There's always plenty to do in running a home. But what you will find is there's new forms of employment, particularly for young women and for men working in the factories. And so what they're doing is they're doing all of that spinning. And it means, although it might have had a negative effect on the spinner who was working on her spinning wheel at home, it also means they're creating a lot more yarn which means those other weavers who had been sitting idle now have more work to do there really shifts around who's working and who's not working and rather than just kind of throwing one group of people onto the scrap heap it just kind of changes the amount of work that's available and the nature of the work and it changes who is doing it so it's all about change more than end or decline so that's interesting so it's kind of substantive societal little change that's happening as a result of this.

9:54Just before we delve into more, just for our listeners who maybe aren't clear on this, what's the timeline of spinning, Jenny? What sort of period are we talking about here when this was going on?

10:04Emma Griffin:18th century. And they're actually, I mean, manufacturers have already started to realise, I mean, they're fairly aware of the fact that the spinning is a problem. But all of this spinning being done on these old wheels in people's homes by women, it just doesn't create enough yarn. The country hasn't got enough yarn the weavers aren't busy enough so they're starting to give out prizes and starting to kind of suggest there's a prize offer a prize for the inventor who can come up with a spinning contraption that will spin several spindles at once and they're doing that in the 1750s and the 1760s and this technology starts to come on stream in the 1770s and 1780s so second half of the 18th century perfect and so this increased productivity we've just been talking about and the societal changes that uh that sort of followed that how far did that actually benefit the people who are doing it so i mean you know someone who's cynical of capitalism might say that all this stuff really just means that the rich get rich of the people who sort of are owning companies are the ones that benefit and actually these sorts of changes you never actually end up doing less work if you are a worker you're you always just someone just says we'll do something else.

11:13What's your take on that?

11:14Emma Griffin:Well, I think you'll get as many different answers to that question as historians that you ask. We all take a very different, you know, lots of different views basically abound as to, you know, what this really means, this change. I think there's been a very long strain amongst historians thinking, I mean, starting with kind of E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is a really good example and a really influential example of the idea that technology is deleterious to working people, but it makes their life more difficult. Before the machines, they lived, I mean, to go back to Marx and Engels, really, the 19th century kind of critique, commentators, the idea that before industrialization, before the factory, before the city, before the machine, people lived quite nice, happy, wholesome lives.

11:58Emma Griffin:They lived out in the countryside. They did a little bit of gardening. They did a little bit of weaving. They lived in kind of stable family units and life was nice. And then, of course, the factory and the machine comes along and it decimates all of that. I don't myself subscribe to that view, partly because I think you can only sustain that if you make a really romantic view of what life before the Industrial Revolution was like. You have to imagine everybody's living a really happy, healthy life. It's really not. It's miserable. People are very poor. They're working in the out of doors. It's drudgery.

12:28Emma Griffin:They have no money. Their children go barefoot. There's nothing really to romanticise. So that's part of my problem with that but I mean there is something that's very true about what's going on and that is the nature of work is changing really significantly there are always some winners and losers in these changes so the losers will be the women who'd be working on spinning wheels in their home beforehand the winners will be the other people the women and the men who are working in the factories earning usually much better wages you've got to earn very much with a spinning wheel in your home you earn much better wages if you move to the city and you work on a big machine in the factory.

13:05Emma Griffin:There's just kind of constant change. I think that's really the thing that I would emphasize. Most people have always had to work. I don't know how far we have to go back into the past to discover a time in which everybody was happy and healthy and everything was shared and we all shared everything equally amongst all of us. I don't think that really, it's such a romanticized view of past. You have the uber-wealthy, the aristocracies who were living a very nice life and you had masses of people who were very, very poor. There's nothing really romantic or pleasant in the distant past that we can look at.

13:36Emma Griffin:The Industrial Revolution changes all of that. Yes, work does become difficult for lots of people. Some people lose their job. There are also some winners. It's the beginning of the world that we know, which is a complex world, but one in which a lot of us manage to find a foothold for ourselves and find interest and autonomy, interest in the work that we do. And most of us, I think, probably don't really want to go back to the 18th century and be a farmhand and grow turnips. It's just not really that appealing, is it, if you think about it? I don't like turnips, so I'm absolutely absolutely anti that whole idea.

14:11I'm just thinking about the losers there just for a second. So that's quite an interesting thing to concern yourself with. So people who were forced to think about a career change in thinking about it in modern terms. Now, in your books, you've looked at kind of the diaries, the personal accounts of people who are living through this experience. I wonder, do you see people sort of cogitating on that and thinking, oh crikey, I'm going to have to do something else? Do you see them sort of reflecting on that?

14:38Emma Griffin:That's a really good question. And yes, I should emphasise, I'm not saying this because this is just my kind of preconceived assumption. It's because I've read loads of working class autobiographies where people talk about exactly these issues. And the reason I have these views is because I've read all of those books. And I'm like, oh, oh, oh, that's interesting. So no, you really don't find working people in the 19th century lamenting the fact that they left the countryside or they go work in the city. Many of the working class autobiographers that I've looked at do precisely make that journey.

15:11Emma Griffin:They're born into rural poverty. They grow up, they become a young man, they move to the city. And in the city, they find all sorts of things that they find really appealing. probably the first and most fundamental is they're no longer working in agriculture, which is hard and boring. And you do it outside in all weathers and it's really badly paid. They get some kind of job in an urban setting where there's a vast array of different jobs that people can do. And people can sort themselves into the job that they find more interesting. If you live in the village, there is only one job. So everybody, whether you like growing turnips or not, everybody has to join in the work of growing a turnip.

15:46Emma Griffin:You move to the city, you could become a baker you could become a shoemaker you could work in the factory you could drive a horse and cart you know so many different things that you can do so that's the first thing the other thing that comes with city life and with living in the city generally is you're much more kind of free intellectually so you don't have the codes of the village you don't have the squire of the village suggesting what church you'll go to and having expectations as to how you and your family behave you've just got a lot of free just like rather like we do in cities today you have a lot of privacy and a lot of freedom as to how you live your life and you can live your life according into your own codes.

16:18Emma Griffin:So I think that's the other thing that really stands out. I've only ever come across, I looked at about 600 working class autobiographies. No, actually for the earlier period, there were a few, about 300. In that, there were dozens that were born in the countryside, moved to the cities and quite enjoy city life. There were only three that moved back to the countryside and they all did so because for some reason or another, they had to for family reasons or various reasons. They're just three of them end up going back. They all just returned to rural poverty so none of them had a positive spin to make on going back to the countryside and it was something they'd had to do by necessity but the vast majority they leave the countryside and they never ever go back again they've got no intention of going back and being a farm worker again you didn't start a business just to keep the lights on you're here to sell more today than yesterday you're here to win lucky for you shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet Like the just one tapping, ridiculously fast acting, sky high sales stacking, championed checkouts.

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18:04Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like... Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels? It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for the stay. So that kind of goes against that romantic view that you were talking about earlier, doesn't it? It suggests that perhaps it wasn't a particularly romantic view and turnips aren't all that they're made up to be. Is there any lesson that we can take there from those people's experience as to how they approach these sort of radical shifts in their lives? We're talking about, you know, we talk today about lifelong learning, don't we?

18:46And I don't suppose people had lifelong learning, but they must have been taught how to do stuff. How did they approach it, do you think?

18:54Emma Griffin:Well, the workplace was very different in the 19th century. So there was none of this going to school and getting exams and going to university and getting degrees in particular subjects. You just had to be quite good in the workplace. And that was basically, for a lot of people, that was how you got. So I think there was much more flexibility and much more mobility. The world of work has changed enormously. But I mean, Dame, I just want to go back to one of the things you said earlier about ChatGPT, which I think is another, you know, it's another, it's a kind of a moment in our own times where we've got this new technology entering into the workforce.

19:24Emma Griffin:And it was really interesting. I think in 2023, I think it was when I heard about ChatGPT for the first time, it was suddenly all over the news. And I didn't know what it was. And I was in this kind of, more than once I was in a room and people were talking about it. I just didn't really know what they were talking about. I mean, which is crazy now. Everybody knows what ChatGPT is. but I had literally never heard of it and looked it up and like oh yeah that's kind of interesting isn't it but it was also really striking as I started to look around it you're getting a lot of commentators when chat GPT started to kind of burst onto the scene saying well this is really bad news for workers because you know their jobs are going to be made obsolete I think most of us can look around the world now and we can see that so far lots of jobs have not been obsolete and I think in some ways it's just the wrong framing and I think it would be interesting we can live through it we're living through it at the moment and we can see how how things play out but it tends to mean that we work differently.

20:13So some jobs that had been done by human hands or human

20:17Emma Griffin:ingenuity will obviously now be done through computing. I would imagine that most businesses, and this is exactly what you see with the spinning jenny, what they'll do is they'll be like, great, we can make more. We can make more and we can sell more. So they won't be taking that necessarily as an opportunity to lay people off. I mean, that will be happening in some areas. Of course it will. but they'll be taking it as an opportunity to work differently and to sell more of whatever it is that they're doing and so I think the kind of the five ten year impact will be that we work slightly differently we all work slightly differently but we're still nowhere near that 15 hour week that John Maynard Keane suggested in 1930 because machinery was going to make work so easy we'll only have to work five three hour shifts and we can get the same amount of work done and we'll all have so much more leisure time that hasn't transpired in the last century and I think it's probably not going to transpire with chat gpt now either hold the leisure thought for just a second i just want to just want to reflect on chat gpt so you're absolutely right that chat gpt specifically and now obviously there's a whole raft of ai things that are that exist it was an extremely sudden moment wasn't it for people who aren't ai watchers like yourself and myself it's suddenly suddenly it's appeared and it's like oh my life this is incredible how do we cope with this I just wonder, so the suddenness, the speed was quite amazing, quite unsettling.

21:38Was the changes in the past, were they of that magnitude in terms of speed, do you think?

21:45Emma Griffin:No, no, they weren't. I think that particularly in Britain, industrialisation and moving over to machines is a really long, drawn out process. And as I say, we're already using lots of machines. But I mean, I think there's lots of parallels. I mean, chat GPT, AI probably should be saying it's more than chat GPT, isn't it? We were already using computers and the computing technology has been around since the 1960s and in the workplaces, the 1980s at least. So the computing was there. It was just a kind of a big change in, you know, is a kind of a big kind of add-on that kind of comes with computing.

22:17Emma Griffin:And I think my examples, my knowledge of the Industrial Revolution is very similar. We were spinning yarn and we were using machinery, the spinning wheel. It's just that we start doing it all in a different way. But those changes in the past happened over a much longer timescale, decades and decades and decades. And it was much slower for remote parts of the country would know very little about the emergence of spinning jennies and factories in other parts of the country. Still got no railways, still got no telephones. Very difficult to know what's happening in other parts of the country. So I think that's right.

22:50Emma Griffin:I mean, the pace of change now is really, truly something to behold. so so that's that's quite a big difference i want so is your reflection here that perhaps we as people living through a period of substantive possibly quite transformative change in a very short period of time that may be a bit of a different experience what happened in the past but broadly speaking these technological innovations are not something you should necessarily worry about except there'll be winners and losers and try and roll roll with that and try and make sure you're if you are a loser that you've you're willing to be flexible and do something else yeah i mean i think um i think what i would say is that there will be change there will be change and yes there will be certain areas and certain things that people do that we just won't be able to continue doing in quite exactly the same way because the computers can now do it so much more quickly and more effectively and so much more efficiently and so much more cheaply so there definitely will be changes but i suspect and there may be there will there will be some skill sets that then can't pivot very easily to something else.