Many say computers have transformed society as deeply as the advent of industry. While computers are powerful, they have not reordered the fundamental basis of society. Ben Landau-Tylor and Wolf Tivy cover the history.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Joined by Ben Landau-Taylor. Ben has this hot take, or perhaps it’s a cold take, that the computer is not a new age of man, that it is a relatively normal technological advance. So Ben, why don’t you kick us off with some of the wild things that people have been saying and why you think they’re not true?
Ben: Yeah. So a lot of people think, and a lot of people say to me, that the computer completely changed the nature of human society. They compare it to the Industrial Revolution. They compare it to the creation of the printing press. I don’t think it’s that big a deal.
I think it’s a very important invention, but I don’t think it measures up to that level of it has totally changed the nature of society. Some people say it’s going to change things. We’re going to replace the entire military with the robots. It’s going to get the future artificial intelligence that disassembles humanity for parts. We’re going to replace money with Bitcoin or something.
We could speculate about the future, but a lot of people also say that in the present, that it has already changed human society to this incredibly revolutionary degree, which I don’t think is true.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. People talk about the information age as the third industrial revolution, somehow equivalent to the first industrial revolution and even the fourth industrial revolution, the ongoing kind of Internet of Things, blah, blah, blah, Klaus Schwab kind of view of the future. Now, more soberly, we can try to find an equivalent impacting technology to the internet or to computers. I spend a good deal of my day behind a computer trying to code, trying to write—trying to communicate with friends.
Ben: You guys are watching this on a computer right now.
Wolf: Yeah. We’re doing our research on computers, et cetera.
It’s similar to how a lot of Americans relate to their cars. Whenever they want to go anywhere, they get in their car, they put the gas in their car, they drive in their car several hundred miles at a time sometimes. And very much it’s transformed our cities, it’s transformed our way of life. But I don’t think anyone says that the car is equivalent to an industrial revolution. The car is an impactful technology.
We take the industrial background for granted (02:44)
Wolf: It’s a moderately impactful technology.
Ben: You’re going to have a hard time understanding our society if you don’t know what cars are and what they can do.
Wolf: And similarly, I think computers have been pretty impactful in that regard. But maybe is this whole thing just a lack of perspective about the level of impact that the Industrial Revolution actually had? Maybe people just don’t have a reference on what that actually meant.
Ben: Yeah. I think that’s a huge amount of it. With cars, I think the car’s a really good example because the thing that really revolutionized human society and really changed so many things about what distance meant and how people could travel and ended up what a state was, how an empire could rule over vast distances, like the train and the steamship just totally upended things—in a way that the car then let you do a lot of the things the train could do in different, cheaper, more fine-grained ways, which was pretty important, but wasn’t overturning. But yeah, and—
Wolf: Yeah. There’s countries where people don’t even use cars very much—like countries in Europe or Japan or something, where a lot of people just take transit. They just take a train or something. And so the car is maybe not as impactful as those. And I wonder, are we cheating a little bit with narrowing it to the car in our comparison to the computer?
Is the computer more like mass long-distance industrialized travel?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of this does come from just historical perspective, as you were saying, because within living memory, I think if you’re going to restrict the field of comparison to things that were invented within the historical memory of people alive today—computer’s probably the biggest one. And—for a lot of people, that just means it’s the biggest thing, because like—the—
Wolf: And we sort of take the industrial background for granted, the idea of factories, the idea of mass produced steel.
Ben: Right. The idea of owning four shirts. Of course you own four shirts. That’s not very many shirts.
Wolf: And that they were made in a factory.
Ben: Right.
And yeah. So I think for a lot of people, if it’s the biggest thing that has changed in their personal experience, and even for pretty young people, the ways that the internet has changed have changed their experience of the world pretty substantially. So it’s very easy to just be like, “Oh, so that’s the big world revolutionary change.” And among people with more historical perspective, I still know some people who will maintain that, oh, the computer is a bigger deal than the printing press, but it’s a rarer opinion because—
Wolf: Yeah. Well, as you say, I think a lot of this is entangled with speculation. We’ve discussed nothing human makes it out of the near future. We’ve discussed the sort of AI kind of speculations, the various things that computers could do or might do or seem like they ought to do, but have not quite done yet. And it’s sort of easy in evaluating the impact of the computer to look at the total long-term impact of the computer, what we think it will be versus what’s actually happened.
The Industrial Revolution feels like it’s done. We did Industrial Revolution. We’ve sort of got industrial society now, at least to some degree, and it no longer feels like a live frontier of revolution.
Ben: Yeah. I think that’s—
Wolf: Whereas the computer feels like a live frontier of revolution.
Ben: Yeah. I think that both of those are wrong. I think that there’s—actually a lot more juice in just industrial progress than in turning up the knob on computer. But—
Wolf: But do you think that’s—
Ben: But as far as—
Wolf: Is that something that could happen or is that something that is happening in the industrial case?
Ben: Yeah. So in the industrial case, yeah, when it comes to revolution in the sense of reshaping society, that’s again in the could happen, and then what we see—is a lot more of the incremental progress along lines that, oh, we’ve got like—
Wolf: The plastic junk gets cheaper every year.
Ben: Yeah. And we’ve got cars that drive themselves, and we’ve got cars that run on electricity. I like having these things, but they are not revolutionizing society in the way that the machine gun did or something.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, actually, that’s an interesting point. One of the things that would really revolutionize society, here we are in speculation again about the role of the computer in history, but one of the things that would really revolutionize society is where it starts to touch on the matter of weapon systems. Like you mentioned, roboticization of the military, maybe War Claude becomes the new commander in chief or something. That would be a legitimate revolutionary change in the world.
Because, as we’ve discussed, weapon systems can redefine political orders.
Ben: Right. And every society is based on what is the relation. One of the important, critical things, you have a military, how does it relate to the rest of society? Is it under the control of some other thing? How do the different military factions sort of compose into a whole?
Like if you get them too upset, they can just coup you, but if you have a bunch of robots, then the calculation is entirely different. You have to be getting into how are the robots controlled? Is there a guy with a little joystick? Do they take verbal commands? How do they know who to take the...
It’s just a totally different question, and it could lead to totally different shapes.
What does it mean to revolutionize society? (08:36)
Wolf: Right. But it has not yet led to totally different shapes, and maybe that’s an interesting kind of definition of what makes a historical revolution, is that it’s when you get to the problem of the organization of society. And so let’s talk about, maybe just to put things into perspective, let’s talk about what the Industrial Revolution did, the original Industrial Revolution, and why it is regarded as one of the most significant facts in human history. Not just, you see all these hockey stick graphs from Our World in Data or something, the world population, world GDP, caloric surplus, all these things that the Industrial Revolution kind of created. But the really sort of undeniable historical fact is that the Industrial Revolution changed how warfare works.
It changed the scale and nature of states. There were a lot of political revolutions around how that was going to be managed.
Ben: Right. And the economic organization, I think, is the one that it just most completely, you can’t even say it transformed it, it just completely overrode it with a new order of a type that had never existed before.
Wolf: Right. Before that, you have much more of this kind of land-based trade. It’s all land and trade and—
Ben: The way that people think about the economy and wealth and getting rich, it’s all, like, “Oh, you get a job.” And this idea of you get a job—
Wolf: That’s an industrial term.
Ben: Yeah. This is from the industrial organization of society. If you’re in 1550 and you’re thinking about where stuff comes from, how you’re going to get money, the idea of, oh, you go out and get a job, is just not the thing that occurs to you. That’s not the way society is organized.
Wolf: Right. And to bring it to concrete technologies, we’ve mentioned kind of the weapon systems, mass production of weapons and ammunition, mass production of steel. It was huge. Before at the beginning of, let’s say, the 19th century, the world ran on sail. There’s sailing ships.
By the end of the 19th century, it’s iron plating on ships that are run on steam, basically. And, that revolution, that’s a very radical change because it changed the nature of naval combat, it changed the nature of what kind of empires could exist.
Ben: One of my favorite anecdotes on this is in the 1700s, the East India Company was basically ruling large swaths of what’s now India on behalf of the British. And they were sending... You’d have to send out some guy to go and rule it, and then they had this big argument about who’s going to rule. Both sides were accusing the other faction of corruption, and there’s this huge argument back at the East India Company headquarters in London—about who’s going to go, and they eventually settle on this compromise slate of three people who are going to go and rule the East India Company holdings in England, and try to untangle—
Wolf: In India
Ben: what’s actually... Yeah. In India, and untangle what’s actually going on and report back. And then their sailing ship, they go over there in a sailing ship. This takes four months or something, six months, I don’t remember.
But then the ship just sinks and they all die. And if we’re doing this in the year—by 1900, your ship would get there just fine, or maybe you’d just send a telegram, probably not all the way to India. But the communications are such that you can rule these distant provinces much, much, much more easily.
Wolf: Right. And so obviously, the whole swath of industrial transportation. We mentioned the car, we mentioned the train, all these things. We also should mention the airplane. There’s all these ways that distances have been compressed physically.
Empires have gotten bigger.
Control has gotten more detailed because of this. How much of the Industrial Revolution’s impact is just that logistics, physical logistics? It’s easier to get from a to B.
Ben: I think I would say a large minority of its impact is just the shrinking the world effect. I think the economic reorganization is the big one. But yeah, just the fact that you can send some MBA from the headquarters to just get on a train for two days and—report about what’s going on in California, and then be there for five days, go back to the New York headquarters. This stuff happened a lot in the big business of the 1910s. And—yeah, the idea of having these big mega corporations, that requires this sort of compressing of distance—in order to have some big corporation that’s operating in all of these different cities that are thousands of miles apart.
The industrial social system (13:56)
Wolf: Mm-hmm. But that’s a different impact from what you’re saying, which is the economic organization itself. How you relate to production and wealth—is very much redefined by industry and the factory and—professionalization that came along with it.
Ben: Yeah, and you have these factories that are made out of men as much as they’re made out of machines. Land tenure is no longer really where the wealth is. It’s not agricultural. It’s not this long-distance commerce. It’s not a lot of the highly specialized, skilled craft stuff that in the High Middle Ages was where a lot of the major wealth concentrations came from that had these very different organizations where you would learn a trade.
That’s just a very different type of thing than you get a job. The getting of a job is this very almost perfunctory process in a lot of ways of you read this thing in the newspaper, you go down, they have an interview with you for half an hour or two hours—and then you’re just in this position, and you can be changed out if you’re like, “This sucks, I want to do something else.” Or if they’re like, “You got drunk too much,” you’re just out.
The capital itself is this thing that can be traded. It’s just this extremely different way of organizing things—in a way that you can see some sort of early precursors going back a very, very long way, but they are much more marginal. They’re not the way that the society is mobilizing its resources. And then, of course, these end up relating to the state in a completely different way. They relate to individual people in a completely different way than a farm in feudal times or even a early 1700s American homestead farm.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. And the third big pillar of impact, if we can narrow it this much, would be, I think, the decisive advantage of production in a war.
Ben: Right, which means that non-industrial systems either become industrial systems or get eaten by them.
Wolf: Yeah. And so just the ability, if you can churn out a lot more shells than the other guy, you can destroy his positions more effectively than he can defend.
Ben: Right. And so this is when you have a system which works well or poorly internally, but then when you put the systems next to each other, which one eats the other one is—largely downstream of if the agriculturalists can get a phalanx of spears and the hunter-gatherers can’t, then—the land is going to end up being under control the way the agriculturalists want to. If the industrialists can get their armies of people with very cheap muskets and the other guys can’t, then it’s kind of over.
Wolf: Right. And so to compare then the computer revolution or what the computer revolution has done so far to the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think there’s anything quite like that—in the computer revolution of is there this decisive military advantage to computerization?
Ben: It gives you—
Wolf: You could argue that there are advantages. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like a decisive military advantage.
Ben: Yeah, it gives you an advantage in the way that having a better-designed tank in World War II, it definitely mattered who had the better tanks. Or who had the better airplanes. This gave you advantage. Battles turned on it. Wars turned on the battles, but—
Wolf: But that sort of—
Ben: it’s not like the British going against the Zulus.
Wolf: Yeah, it’s this within the paradigm kind of—distinction where it’s like, “Okay, well, these guys have better industrial technology than those guys-”
Ben: Yeah. It’s like the Amer—
Wolf: “... so maybe they have an advantage.”
Ben: It’s like the Americans have radar and the Japanese don’t, and so the Americans win the naval battles almost all of the time. I don’t know. It’s probably not even at that level yet. I could see it getting there in single-digit years, maybe. Who knows?
We’re speculating again.
Wolf: Right. Speculating, yeah. War Claude is going to totally revolutionize war.
Ben: I’d rather have it than not, but like...
The rise of the laptop class (18:41)
Wolf: But okay. And then in the transformation of our relation to work, the interesting thing that the computer has done almost is actually the rise of the email job or the fake job. Right? Somehow that’s what associates in my mind to the impact of the computer on our relationships to production and wealth is the growth of this enormous kind of quasi-superfluous administrator class that uses computers and sends emails all day. But what are they actually doing?
Well, something work computing something. And this is where people speculated, I think in the 1970s, computers are going to revolutionize and replace administrative work. We’re going to be able to have much leaner organizations or have these kind of linear programming systems sort of plan production in these really sophisticated ways. And I don’t know how much of that has panned out. Instead, it just seems like it’s become this vector for questionable growth.
Ben: Yeah. And it’s kind of an interesting question what’s happened there because—
Wolf: Yeah, how much of that is because of computers or—separate.
Ben: And also there are areas where you can see real efficiency gains from computers in ways that are just like Uber exists and just is much more efficient than you could get with human dispatchers. Or Amazon is—not just the storefront ordering, which that is itself a big deal, but even if you look at how does Walmart manage their warehouses, they manage them in ways that—
Wolf: It’s all computerized
Ben: you couldn’t do... Yeah. They would just have more excess inventory at fewer locations, traveling longer distances if they didn’t have the computer spreadsheets. But at the same time, there’s this massive growth of—email jobs doing things that don’t really need to be done. And I think part of it is Jevons law, the idea that...
So Jevons was writing about coal way back in, I want to say the 1800s, where a lot of people were arguing that as we get better and more efficient at coal, our society is going to be using less coal. And Jevons was like, “You all have it backwards.” Whereas as we get more efficient at using coal—
Wolf: We’ll use more coal
Ben: it’ll just be so cheap and we’re going to use more coal because there’s more that we can do with it. And we’ve kind of Jevons lawed the administration, but that’s been going hand in hand with the sort of political creation of positions, not in order to do the work, but in order to employ the person.
Wolf: Distribute the spoils.
Ben: Yeah, to distribute the spoils. And a lot of what’s been going on is industrial society is producing an incredible amount of spoils, and then how are they getting distributed? It happens that a lot of the way that the spoils are being distributed is through fake computer jobs. Whereas in the Tammany Hall days, you would have to have a fake job that at least ostensibly required a person to go stand in a toll booth. Now they can do that—in their underwear from home.
And so we’ve Jevonsed that as well, and also for reasons that have nothing to do with computers or industrial anything. It’s just kind of an older society, and so it’s more corrupt, and so there just is more spoils being distributed, and this happens to be one of the convenient channels, certainly not the only one that it goes through.
Cultural homogenization (22:34)
Wolf: Yeah. And so then if we can compare to the third big thing we identified in the impact of the Industrial Revolution, which is the logistics. In particular with computers, it’s going to be information logistics, like the ability to spread culture around, the ability to spread information around, to spread news around.
Ben: And this is where I think it’s had the biggest impact.
Wolf: Yeah, I think it’s had a very large impact in that regard, like Europe and America substantially kind of having a lot of discourse overlap now. A lot of the kinds of political tendencies that get expressed in Europe are versions of the American cousins. We see this sort of cultural homogenization around the world. I think this is going to have a lot bigger of an effect than it has yet been able to have. I think there’s a certain sort of cultural homogenization that comes from that, or not necessarily homogenization, but a remixing.
That things will become a lot more global as a result of the computer. And this feels like a large area of impact, but still not a huge impact in the sense of when stacked up against the Industrial Revolution.
Ben: Yeah. I would—
Wolf: Although we can say maybe it will.
Ben: I would look at it in terms of its comparison, it seems like a bigger deal than the transition from radio to television—which was quite a big deal. Maybe roughly on par, maybe a little bit smaller than the invention of radio and just creation of broadcast media in the first place, which—for not everyone has gone deep into the history here, but the creation of radio and broadcast media like this, and this had this huge centralizing effect was really necessary. I’m sure you’re aware of all of this, of how it was for the 20th century super states, and as they were mobilizing for the world wars, you probably wouldn’t have been able to have that sort of huge, massive mobilization for the world wars without radio. I just don’t think it would’ve worked.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. Because before that, you have people scattered around. How do you get the message out to everybody? You have to send officers with orders—and—
Ben: Whereas if you have—
Wolf: newspapers and all this. Whereas, if you can just sit there and turn on the switch and broadcast to everybody
Ben: It hits people in this really emotional way, where if they turn on the radio and they get FDR’s fireside chat, or they get Hitler doing his big compelling, screaming, orating thing—and then that will just get the average guy who’s not going to sit and read your 3,000-page tract just really hyped up in a way that—prior technologies couldn’t.
Wolf: Yeah. And the interesting thing is the way that was sort of a temporary effect, right? It’s like when there wasn’t radio media and radio media comes on the scene, it’s this new hyper-compelling thing that no one’s ever seen before, and it has this huge effect. And now you couldn’t imagine getting hyped up about what someone’s saying on the radio anymore. It’s sort of this boring—
Ben: Right. And in the ear—
Wolf: this boring thing. Whereas on the internet, there’s things happening on the internet that are hyping us up, right?
Ben: Right. And in the early days of the printing press—
Wolf: New forms of slop
Ben: it was causing all the religious wars, and then after—about a century, people kind of figured out how to deal with that, got the psychic antibodies.
Wolf: How much of that do you think is that people get used to the new media, and how much of it is it that the sort of frontier of mobilization moves on to a different form of media? Because you could argue the frontier of mobilization has moved on to crazy stuff that we see on the internet, and the things we do on the internet. This is sort of where we’re getting our ideas and excitement from now. And this is why no one’s really reading the newspaper anymore, no one’s really listening to the radio or watching TV and getting their ideas from there except various dinosaurs. But could we expect that if technology did not improve for a while, we would all sort of get bored of the internet as a vector of radicalization and just kind of settle into some kind of equilibrium, or—
Ben: I do think there would be an effect like that. I think it’s kind of limited, and it’s not going to go all the way, but if you look at the printing press and it was quite a long time before the printing press got succeeded by a new medium. And you can sort of make some finer distinctions of like, they got these new types of pamphlets and brochures figured out, or they got—cheaper paper when they got wood pulp or whatever. But even within that, you just don’t really see printing press driven returns to the very early sort of reformation days. Or even if you look at more recently, with television.
In the early days of television when they were like, “Wow, we’re showing you the Vietnam War,” and people freaked out about it in ways that—I remember the days before the internet was this big, huge political channel when TV was still the big game in town, and when they were showing video from the Iraq War on the news, and it was not hitting in the way that I’ve heard about the Vietnam stuff hitting. So I think that there is a real sort of antibody effect, even apart from the—only your granddad is still getting his news from Facebook instead of TikTok.
Technological changes vs novelty effects (28:43)
Wolf: Facebook. Yeah. Exactly. So there’s basically two effects there, right? One is the structural effect.
A new media technology, a new logistical technology can structurally change society in that it, the internet, for example, makes this sort of many to many kind of mass consensus thing—happen—
Ben: And in 1960—
Wolf: in a different way
Ben: if you’re doing a coup, you seize the radio tower, and now there isn’t really an equivalent of that because it’s just a structurally different technology.
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. And so there’s these structural differences that it’s made. But then there’s the novelty effect, right? When something new comes on, tickles a new part of your brain in a way that it hadn’t been tickled before, things can happen just because you’re breaking out of the implicit containment of the previous order. But in some way, it’s this one-time kind of—liberation of energy.
Ben: Which is partly because you’re exploring new forms that people don’t have the psychological antibodies to because they haven’t encountered them—and they haven’t had time to get cynical. But I think there’s also a big generational thing here where the people who tend to pioneer the new ones just tend to be quite young, and they tend to be not yet incorporated into the existing power structure.
Wolf: That’s an interesting point. Yeah. They tend to be more revolutionary just by structural—means.
Ben: In the early days of YouTube, the YouTubers were all quite young. Now it’s—been longer, they’re older, but who’s the oldest TikTok star in the world?
Wolf: Yeah, they’re probably some young person, right?
Ben: Yeah, they’re probably 28. Basically a grandad.
Wolf: Grandad. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, PewDiePie who was the previous generation of YouTubers, right?
Ben: Yeah. He gets older at one year per year.
Wolf: He’s retired to Japan, yeah.
So this impact stuff, so there’s sort of things you have to discount from the impact of the internet and things you would have to kind of correct for in the other direction. Things you might want to discount is kind of the novelty effect, like that will wear off. On the other hand, there’s structural changes that have not yet fully come to fruition.
The case of journalism’s decline (31:05)
Ben: Right. There is also a third thing in addition to these two—which is other changes in society that have nothing to do with the internet, which many of these, I think, get popularly and incorrectly attributed to the internet.
Wolf: Right. People associate the kind of collapse of dating or the collapse of social life—
Ben: These are all trends that had been—
Wolf: or corruption or whatever
Ben: it’s been ongoing since before the internet. It’s been written about since long before it, and just sort of the line keeps going in one direction, and then you pick this random point and you’re like, “This thing.” It’s like, no, it didn’t cause all this stuff.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s like the iPhone caused the decline in fertility.
Ben: Yeah. It’s like, oh—
Wolf: It’s like, no, not quite, but...
Ben: Yeah. And the way people talk about journalism, I think, does this a ton.
Wolf: Right. That the internet killed journalism. But actually maybe journalism died of natural causes.
Ben: Yeah. So, yeah. Again, if this is one of those things that takes more historical perspective than many people have, if you just grow up with we have this unified, fairly responsible, fairly sedate, fairly middle of the road, not perfect, but generally epistemically does a pretty good job of trying to find the truth most of the time. If that’s what it’s like when you’re born, that’s what it’s like when you grow up, and then something changes, it’s natural to be like, “Oh, that thing was the natural state, and something weird happened to break it.” But like—for most of history, the equivalence of journalism, including the earlier newspapers were from—were much more the sort of free for all, everyone knifing each other, garbage fire that we’ve—seen today.
And then it was the broadcast media in that era, I guess, you saw this also through the print, but you saw in the mid-20th century, this sort of unusual coming together of this sort of respectable and epistemically relatively healthy sort of media apparatus, which to my eye looks like this weird anomaly that lasted kind of a surprisingly long time before it regressed to the mean.
Wolf: Right. And that’s sort of the creation of the cathedral at its height. What Moldbug’s cathedral, right? This kind of confluence of the academics and the newspapers and the TV as this sort of coordinated and relatively high-quality ideological control mechanism, which now is sort of decaying into just open, corrupt politicking and—
Ben: Right, which was the—
Wolf: firing people for the wrong opinions and—
Ben: Yeah, which was—
Wolf: other stuff
Ben: we are returning to the days of the Dreyfus affair, the sort of everyone has their own personal reality. And you’ve got all of the weird factions and influencers pursuing their ideological and financial projects and...
Wolf: Well, the argument from the impact of the internet would be that that moment of relative apparent health in the mid-century was due to the lack of purchase for the opposition. They had just come out of a war in which everyone was sort of forcibly unified, both within the kind of United States, the so-called free world, and obviously in the conquered territories in Europe and Asia. And there wasn’t really this possibility of kind of coming at the system with alternative facts, so to speak. And so it got to kind of have this monopoly on framing, and I think people who have studied that period historically, they might cringe if you say that the thing actually was this open, relatively healthy system where there wasn’t a lot of censorship, knife fighting of the type that we get now. Because the—
Ben: There was censorship, knife fighting, but less of the outright lying.
Wolf: Yeah, maybe. Or maybe they could hide things, I think, a lot better in that time.
Ben: Yeah, it was much more, “We’re not going to talk about this,” was much more how it was done.
Wolf: Yeah. And they could coordinate the fact that no one’s talking about that. Whereas now it’s like people are talking about it on the internet and whatever it is. And it’s like they try to stop that in various ways, kind of can’t, which means that the whole discourse takes on this much more escalated character of sort of open cynicism that you could argue is a direct consequence of internet democratization of media.
Ben: And the thing I think that this explanation you just gave overstates is the role of the technology in the disintegration of the consensus forming. Where I think the consensus forming is actually just very hard to do. Requires a lot of skilled people getting along with each other, making compromises, figuring things out in back rooms. That’s a difficult skill set—which was basically just going extinct with the last of the boomers were the last people who knew how to do it. And you can see this even in, like—like if you look at what happened to journalism when it got taken over by millennials, control over it basically skipped right from the boomers to the millennials.
Gen X, as so often, just kind of got passed over. And then as the millennials took over, including within the established journalistic outlets, it wasn’t that like they were doing this other thing and getting outmaneuvered by this much faster, more energetic internet thing. It was that when the millennials took over the journalism stuff, they started doing this uncoordinated, free-for-all, pursuing their pet projects, not doing the sort of consensus forming coordination, which is actually just very hard to do.
Wolf: But they were also doing a lot of the internet mob behavior and so on. And if you look at the particular personalities, a lot of them were Something Awful goons or something. Like they were from forums on the internet where these people were trained up. Like that whole cohort of like 2010’s sort of mainstream radical left kind of journalists who brought us such wonderful things—as cancel culture, like that, they came out of the internet in a very substantial degree.
Ben: Yeah. And many have said that the current culture war is just the continuation of Something Awful versus 4chan.
Wolf: Right. Exactly. Like it’s all Gamergate all the way down, right? Yeah. It’s about ethics in games journalism.
But—
Ben: And so the particular thing that was available to take over was very much incubated by the internet, for sure.
Wolf: Yeah. Okay. So, that’s another point, right? It’s like the old system was decaying, right, in its ability to train its people. And so that’s why the
Ben: And it probably would have held on for longer and the disintegration would have been slower had there not been—
Wolf: The internet
Ben: these sort of like... Yeah, which had created this sort of niche where the sort of new super virus can evolve, and then it sort of goes in and displaces the old thing from its previous evolutionary niche. But it looks to me like it was disintegrating even without that. It probably would’ve taken another, I don’t know, 10, 15 years or something if I had to guess.
Wolf: Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of fun to imagine this alternate world in which we never invent computers and we’re doing like the equivalent of 4chan, but with pamphlets and stuff. I don’t know. It’s a very different world. But it’s not different in the way, I guess this is the point, it’s not different in the way that the Industrial Revolution was different.
The time traveler thought experiment (39:00)
Ben: Right. Yeah, like if you were to take somebody from the year 1890 and bring them to today, then they’d think a lot of the stuff we have is very cool and very like, wow.
You can like get in a robot car, you can have a video call. This is the sort of crazy future stuff that their sci-fi people were dreaming up as the gee whiz gonzo stuff. But if you’re like, “How is society organized?” They’d basically be able to navigate it.
Wolf: Right. Whereas you take someone from 1690, and you do the same thing, they’re like, “What the hell is going on?”
Ben: Right. If you put the guy from 1790 into 1890, he’s going to kind of be lost. And you can see this was still sort of an ongoing process. It wasn’t just all over in one moment. And there was this movie they made after World War I, Sergeant York, about the historical Sergeant York—who’s this country bumpkin from this subsistence agricultural community up in the Appalachians.
And in the movies, they have this, one of the arcs when he gets called up to go to the war and goes through the training camp, and he has to learn what a subway is—and be acculturated into an industrial society, and like—
Wolf: Right. No, that’s a good point. It’s like you take someone out of the song Yankee Doodle and put them in a subway. It’s like, wow, now that’s a big difference. And that’s 1790 to 1890.
Ben: Right. Or the future was not evenly distributed, even in 1890. You can find those pockets. But if you find the pockets of 1890 and bring them to 2026, the guys will be like, “These are some cool machines, and I basically understand how the people are interacting with each other.”
What will the full development of a computerized society look like? (41:02)
Wolf: Right. And yeah, to sort of defend the honor of the computer here, it’s a little bit cheap, though the computer has been around and as a mass phenomenon for maybe 25, 30 years, right? And the first 25 or 30 years of the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think were necessarily, depending on where you count the beginning, right? It’s like, was it as impressive as what we have, as what we’ve done with the computer?
Ben: Yeah, the one that really reshaped society was what the historians call the Second Industrial Revolution.
Wolf: Yeah, which is the one in the 1900s. Or sorry, the 1800s.
Ben: The 1800s. Yeah.
Wolf: Yeah, the 19th century.
Ben: Which was like 100 years after the steam engine and them figuring out what a factory even is.
Wolf: Yeah, and the train. The train was this enormous thing. But to turn back to that question, like okay, 30 years of computer revolution has been a lot, pretty revolutionary, right? We spend our time doing different things. Maybe it’s not yet the totality of what was seen in the Second Industrial Revolution when they really figured out kind of synthetic energy technology or non-muscle energy was really the driver of that, right?
It was fossil fuels, basically. And the if we, let’s say, project computers out another 30 years and make sober predictions or less sober predictions, depending on our mood, I think the impact is going to be quite large. And this is, let’s say, without the more speculative stuff like artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, obviously, is this huge wild card. If we get artificial intelligence, that will be as significant as the Industrial Revolution.
Ben: For some definitions of artificial intelligence, more significant. I doubt that those are going to occur anytime soon, but if they did, then, woo.
Wolf: Yeah. But let’s put that aside. Just what can we project out about the impact of the computer given the directions we know? I think, okay, more people interacting with computers more of the time, more computerization of processes, more total surveillance through computerization, more automation of most tasks, or not most tasks, but of the type that we’ve seen with current AI technology. There’s a lot left in the tank of just things we know are happening.
Ben: It certainly isn’t done.
Wolf: It isn’t.
Ben: And so the reason why I expect its impact to be more in the ballpark of the last 30 years of computer than the Industrial Revolution is largely because the Industrial Revolution, it’s industrial, it’s physical. It’s material processes in the world that are making new machines.
Because it is physical creation rather than digital, it seems like so much of the energy from the computer stuff just gets bled off into this sort of navel-gazing digital stuff doing digital stuff doing digital stuff—that then doesn’t have an outlet back into real power—in a way that the industrial thing just doesn’t seem to... The way it compounds just seems a lot more onanistic than the way the industrial stuff compounds.
Wolf: So let’s again look at our dimensions of development, right? So one of them is logistics, another one is weapons systems, and I forget what the third one was, but, well, I guess the—
Ben: Dominance
Wolf: the dominance of production, actually. So—
Ben: And I think the political legitimacy is also a very big one, but—that might be separate.
Wolf: Let’s look at logistics. We’ve commented on a probable kind of cultural globalization, and now this arguably is more a political condition. I think Camus saw a lot of this mass migration stuff coming long before the computer, in his book “Camp of the Saints,” kind of describes the moral condition of—
Ben: Right, and we’ve—
Wolf: a lot of this mass migration stuff.
Ben: And we’ve seen it sort of gradually ramping up one notch at a time for a bit over a century, basically.
Wolf: Yeah, but at the same time, this internet homogenization and having masses of people from the Third World on the same internet as us, or even just we just did this translation thing, the translation merge with Japan, where now we have the same Twitter, and we see Japanese tweets, and Japanese see American tweets, and at first it’s this wonderful honeymoon love affair, and soon it’s going to be everyone at each other’s throats because we have very different moral assumptions about things.
Ben: In the same way that the radio got rid of all of the regional American accents. The internet is sort of turning that dial up another notch.
Wolf: Yeah. And so you can argue, okay, now we’re talking about fundamentally a very different world. If you really play that out, it’s like, the only cultures left in the world at the end of that are internet subcultures at some level.
Everything becomes a global phenomenon in reference to other global phenomena. That would be the sort of endpoint prediction of light-speed communications all over the world as this baseline cultural tradition. Then you have in the military weapons systems stuff, we already have robotics and automation happening in the war front in Ukraine in particular, where I think Zelenskyy just the other day was bragging about they had some robot go and advance and take a position and hold it—with no man.
Ben: Yeah. Which you never know how true wartime claims are, but it could be true, and the fact that we are getting to the point where it’s even conceivable shows what the trajectory is.
Wolf: Yeah. And that starts to feel like, okay, that starts to be a decisive advantage. You don’t need people. You just need to be able to purchase or manufacture enough material.
Ben: So the critical thing here, though, is still the manufacturing.
Wolf: And tie it with software. Yeah. So that’s maybe just still part of the sort of previous industrial revolution, right?
Ben: Right. If you have the better software, but they’re just making 50 times as many of their robot machine gun dogs, then I don’t think your software’s going to be that much better.
Wolf: Yeah, unless it’s, let’s say, AGI level. If it’s fully autonomous at that level.
Ben: Yeah. If it awakens and designs the nanobot swarm, then sure, we’re talking about a different thing.
Wolf: Well, I’m not even talking that far. I just mean let’s say your robots were as intelligent as people in terms of their ability to navigate an environment and reason through complex situations that they find themselves in, versus robots that had to be remotely controlled, and therefore it could be jammed or had more rudimentary control systems. I think that’s—
Ben: It’s an advantage, to be sure
Wolf: it’s an advantage. It’s maybe not a decisive advantage. It’s not on the order of industry versus non-industry.
But I think it will be a pretty big impact on warfare. Computerization’s going to be a very big impact on warfare.
Ben: And it has been a big impact on warfare already, even if you—
Wolf: And then—
Ben: Even if you’re just looking at the weapons targeting systems for missiles—and stuff like that, which ends up just... Yeah.
Computers and material production (49:27)
Wolf: Yeah. And so the other big dimension that we were considering was the way it transforms our relationship to production. And what do we expect there? Computerization kind of trended out on the current trajectories. Where do we end up with that?
Because so much of it has been this sort of confusing, counterintuitive, non-productivity growth despite—total softwarization of everything.
Ben: So there’s one distinction that I want to make here to talk about this. Because, and we’ve been talking about computers and the internet—and we’ve been treating them as one object, but I think this actually is kind of confusing. I think they are better treated as two different... Obviously you can’t have the internet without a computer, but—every technology has dependencies and so forth. And for purposes of analysis, I think considering the internet as a communications technology is quite different from considering computation as an organizational technology.
And so when it comes to considering the relation to production, I think a lot of commerce is going to, a very consistent trend that shows no signs of slowing down is more and more commerce being done over the internet. And how much does this depend on computation? Only in the sense that that’s how you run the internet, really. But the stuff that I’m most excited about when it comes to production—comes much more from being able to do computation than it does from being able to do communication.
Wolf: Can you give us examples of that?
Ben: So for example, there are computer numerical controlled machine tools, CNC machine tools. This is a little less than a century old, but it’s a technology that’s been steadily improving and—these are basically one of the super critical, super load-bearing parts of the current industrial stack because they are machines that just move the cutting head in a extremely precise pattern that is perfectly programmed in, and achieve levels of precision and regularity that machine tools prior to computer control just couldn’t do. And that just gives you pretty bananas types of advances in what physical objects you can produce, how the ways you can mass manufacture them, the sorts of things that just wouldn’t have been feasible to mass manufacture at all, become quite easy when you can have the reasonably expensive CNC machine tool make some incredibly cheap templates that you then inject the plastic into, and now you’re just producing the final products for pennies. And so if there’s further stuff like that, they’ve got stuff like the semi-autonomous robot arms in factories. Taking things like that, I understand that there’s a lot of work on sort of redesigning factories, trying to put more use on, automation is the buzzword.
I hear that there’s a lot of exciting stuff of this going on in China. How true is that? It’s hard to be sure. I don’t know. I don’t have great inside look into what’s actually going on there, but from the amount of stuff that they’re able to come out much more cheaply, yeah.
It seems like something’s going on there, and that type of thing when it comes to how do you take all of the energy from computer and have it not just go in this Ouroboric loop forever, but just actually siphon that off into, “Oh, we’ve just got way more cars,” or, “Our house is bigger.” “We’ve got all of the insulin so that we don’t have to worry about how much insulin costs.” “The planes are going faster.” The ways that you apply computation to the physical production is the thing that I’m very excited about, and I think that if it ends up being something that comes closer to the scale of the Industrial Revolution, I expect it to come through channels like that.
Wolf: Yeah, I wonder. That one, I’m not even sure. It’s hard to imagine that taking on even the scale of the Industrial Revolution because it feels like, yeah, okay, computing sort of enables much better industry, like CNC control—3D printing, that sort of thing.
Ben: We’re not talking about a political reorganization where—you still end up with an economic paradigm of—
Wolf: It’s just hyper industry
Ben: companies, factories, jobs.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s just hyper industry instead of industry, right?
Ben: Yeah. Within the Carroll Quigley categorization that we’ve talked about a couple of times—it’s still the same basic instrument of expansion, just expanding.
Wolf: Right. And yeah, I wonder. The point about disentangling, you can look at the effects of computational power separately from its communicative power. But it’s extremely hard to imagine a world that has a lot of computational power that doesn’t also have rapid communications all over the world. Because it’s so trivial to...
It’s not trivial, but like—
Ben: We’ve already done the hard part
Wolf: even if we hadn’t, it is among the obvious capabilities of software to—do wire protocols. And once you have wire protocols, you set up these relays between, maybe it’s not the internet, it’s some other system, but it’s not fundamentally difficult to send messages from a to B—through electricity using computers. We had telegrams going all over the place—and telegram operators do, do, do, do, do—
Ben: All your human telephone switchboard operators who would just be—plugging the different memes into the different—
Wolf: And so there’s just this obvious immediate application of computing where computing, by nature, is just going to revolutionize communications because of that. And, so I think it can’t be fully disentangled.
Ben: Right. The specific protocols that we have, the specific social structures, those could have gone differently. But it would have gone somewhere. There would’ve been some sort of mass communication protocol, even if the details ended up different.
Wolf: Yeah. To get into things that would actually be on par with the Industrial Revolution, like ubiquitous computing power actively optimizing the shape of things in response to the environment, that’s where the world starts to look radically different. Like edge, in buzzword terms, edge computing. But in a big way.
In this room, we’re talking solid objects that were manufactured. Which is different from, let’s say you had meta-objects that could materialize in or be somehow an application of direct computing power in the immediate—
Ben: I’m not really understanding what you’re—
Wolf: So, I’m not sure what this technology would look like. I’m not saying computers alone will do this. I’m saying, what I’m trying to imagine along the vector of computing, what would actually transform the world, and something where computing power became powerful enough that it can be actively applied in terms of moving physical stuff around in spaces as we use the spaces. Or changing the nature of manufactured objects to be not just dumb manufactured objects, but almost living sort of responsive things—
Ben: In—
Wolf: through an application of computing power. Let’s say nanotechnology, for example. We imagine a swarm of very small elements that can arrange themselves into a larger object. A huge part of that problem is the computing power of—knowing what shape to arrange yourself into and how to do that, and having all the actuation problem is as much a control problem as anything else. And that starts to feel like, okay, now we’re not really even talking about production anymore, we’re talking about something else maybe.
Ben: Yeah, if you got that sort of thing, if you gave a sci-fi author two years to think about how that would change society, they might come up with some cool guesses. But off the top of my head, I’m just being like, “Yeah. Wow, it’d just be a totally different system.”
What would it mean for computing to be as impactful as the Industrial Revolution? (58:21)
Wolf: Yeah, and that’s what feels actually as revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. Where it’s changing the basic nature of the world you’re interacting with in the way... The Industrial Revolution, it went from things being basically made by hand by people you probably know, or like—
Ben: Yeah, and it ends up—
Wolf: To it’s in some factory somewhere and it’s all standardized and—
Ben: Right, and that just ends up totally rewriting all of the mental categories that you look at society through in order to understand the new world that’s been made.
Wolf: Yeah, and the factory. What’s the computer equivalent of the factory? Or the hyper-computerization future equivalent of the factory. We still have factories now. Factories don’t seem like they’re going anywhere.
Ben: Right. It’s not like we got rid of—
Wolf: But if you had something that—
Ben: farms when we got factories
Wolf: But some people have imagined that computing power and 3D printing and so on would eliminate the factory. That you just—
Ben: Yeah, like if you’ve ever read “The Diamond Age” where—
Wolf: Right, like your microwave spits out whatever you need it, you just ask it. That’s radically different.
Or we had the example of artificial intelligence, obviously. If the computers are as intelligent as people, and thus can replace people in the full sense—that starts to look radically different because now you have whole societies and powers in the world that are radically out of step with their population. Or maybe they don’t even have a human population and there’s this massive power—
Ben: Yeah, you can start envisioning things where a country just ends up having a population of 213.
Wolf: Right. But they’re actually the most powerful country in the world because they’ve got this enormous artificial intelligence, blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, I’m trying to project out what would it mean for computing to be as impactful as the Industrial Revolution, these sort of speculative scenarios. I wonder what the least speculative scenario is where the computer has as much of an impact as the Industrial Revolution.
Ben: Yeah. So the least speculative one that I can think of offhand—which is still pretty speculative obviously, because we’re talking about very big changes, is something where you get the factory itself ends up being actually automated. Not in the sense of oh, you’ve got a bunch of things shaped like a man walking around doing the things that a man would do, but like—the tools are all just custom redesigned to be operated by the software. And it doesn’t actually need either literally no human intervention or little enough that you don’t need a specialist class. That if you imagine that the generals or the politicians can just have the factory do exactly what they want, as well as they would without the intermediating layer of factory specialists.
And also the sort of actually fully capable soldier robots, such that humans become militarily not very important either. If you get both of those together, just sort of projecting forward the sort of bull case for the improved artificial intelligence, it strikes me as unlikely, but certainly conceivable that just turning up the dial on the current stuff could get something like that.
Wolf: Yeah. I think you don’t even necessarily need one or the other. I think either of those actually alone would be sufficient. A fully robotized army feels like it overturns the settlement of force that the Industrial Revolution established. And likewise, I think actually fully automated engineering and factory reconfiguration feels like a country that doesn’t need to be socially organized with respect to the means of production could have a decisive production advantage nonetheless, right?
That’s what that would look like, is sort of the factories become cows that you can sort of farm without having to think about it.
Ben: Is that how you solve the fertility problem? You just get rid of the industrial effect on the way that the human organization towards industrial stuff has caused fertility to just sort of slowly decline over centuries, then we’re just getting rid of our industrial organization by means of superseding it, and so—
Wolf: Yeah. Sort of this bifurcation of the humans go this way and the industry goes that way. Actually, I think what the result of that is, is the extinction of humans, not the flourishing of humans.
Ben: Yeah. Because it’s—
Wolf: Because the humans are no longer relevant to production, right? And I think what’s relevant—
Ben: Well, that’s why I was thinking of the conjunction of the production and military.
Wolf: Yeah. But I think even without the military, humans would become this sort of vestigial weapons operator class that—
Ben: Like the horse-riding steppe nomads.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s hard to know who’s going to have decisive power in these things. My general bias is that I think the means of production are very important, and if you don’t have the means of production, you’re not long for this world.
Ben: That’s certainly true, but given the means of production, you also need someone or conceivably something to then—
Wolf: That can defend it
Ben: Right. And like—
Wolf: Physically, yeah
Ben: and if the robot is able to do both of those things, then this makes sense.
Wolf: Then it’s totally decisive. I think either sort of speculative scenario there would be sufficient to replace or to be a change on the order of the Industrial Revolution. I think whatever else happens as a result of actual fully automated factories, or meta-automated factories, that you can just tell it, “I need a factory that does X” and the factory goes and reconfigures itself and starts spitting out X. Now, we’re getting really speculative. I don’t know what it’s actually going to look like, but it’s like Claude Code, but factory, right? You can imagine it.
It’s not that far off, and—
Ben: I think it’s pretty far off, but I guess we’ll find out.
Wolf: It’s not that far off conceptually.
Ben: Conceptually, yes.
Wolf: I think physically, getting Claude Code to actually move the tools around may be—
Ben: Yeah, I see what you mean
Wolf: a little bit less easy. But conceptually, it’s not that far off, right? We sort of have the conceptual elements, and that would definitely, I would say, overturn the industrial era. But certainly, I think it also immediately—whatever autonomy is involved in actually running the factory is also going to be weaponizable, as an obvious point. But even without that or putting that aside, I think that would be sufficient.
And in a way, that’s very similar to what I was talking about with the kind of more ambient computerized matter sort of speculation, where in some way the computation comes to kind of insert itself in the relationship to production in a way that overturns the industrial order.
Yeah. That’s basically, I think one of these scenarios, maybe something else, would be what it would take for computers to be actually as revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. I think some of those are very possible. Some of those might even happen, but to your point, none of that has happened yet.
Ben: Yeah. Which is not to say that it hasn’t been a big deal and hasn’t changed society in many ways as have been, but I think that the list of technologies throughout the human history that have been as important as the computer is at least dozens, probably not more than 150 at the top end.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. All right. Well, I think we’ve been going on long enough. So this has been a very interesting discussion speculating on the sort of impact of computers and the possible impact of computers.
Ben: Yeah. A fun one for sure.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Ben.