How technology will affect us depends on our choices today
For many of us, the technological revolution began in the 1950s.The Russians launched Sputnik, and the free world gaped in awe.
But the real technological age began half a century earlier, when citizens discovered practical and recreational uses for a machine that made a grinding, sputtering noise as it rolled across the American landscape.
Enter the age of the automobile.
As the automobile revolution picked up speed, however, the economic and political stakes could not have been higher.
Go back 100 years in time. The year is 1908.
There are no roads to speak of, let alone highways. But a new-fangled contraption is about to signal a new era in American history.
Imagine, for instance, that for the past 200 years your ancestors have relied on quite a different form of transportation — the horse and buggy.
But early in the 20th century, a task force has just released a report saying that America is “at risk” — because its horse breeding and training are afflicted by a “rising tide of mediocrity.”
It appears that Russian, Japanese and German horses not only eat more oats but also can run faster and farther than American horses.
And since everyone knows that the horse is essential to agriculture, transportation, industry and the military, it’s obvious that an all-out effort is needed to raise the quality of U.S. horse flesh if America hopes to be competitive in the 20th century world.
Oh, and by the way, the task force also suggests that, since the “horseless carriage” is becoming increasingly popular, all horses and their trainers should take a course in “automobile literacy” so they won’t be scared by the noise of these curious contraptions as they come roaring across the fields and farms.
Does any of this sound at all familiar?
Now imagine that America’s chief executive dubs himself the “equestrian president,” and he gathers all the U.S. governors together to establish a set of national goals aimed at assuring that the “New American Horse” meets “world class standards.”
A new strategy is born: “No Horse Left Behind.”
The NHLB movement plays on the ear of American voters. Business leaders pool millions of dollars to help fund programs such as “Horses That Work.”
Instead of lobbying for paved roads, traffic lights, parking lots and affordable fuel supplies, proponents of the reform movement are totally oblivious to a costly and futile attempt to save an obsolete American establishment based solely on horse and mule energy.
Business-stable partnerships are the rage. Wrangler-of-the-year awards are handed out to breeders and trainers as if they were gold medals.
And though some gains toward improving the quality of American horseflesh were recorded at the outset of the movement, eventually new technological advances began to sweep across the nation and eliminated the need for the large four-legged beasts of burden.
It wasn’t long before NHLB started to fail.
Every time an automobile or truck replaced a horse or mule, it threatened the livelihood of a host of mule skinners, saddle and bridle makers, liverymen, veterinarians and such.
One of the first casualties in the once-flourishing horse culture was the local blacksmith shop. There just weren’t enough people who knew the secrets of servicing the sleek transportation creatures of the past.
The next victim was the American farmer, who in the early 20th century represented more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce (at a time when a majority of Americans lived on farms or in rural towns).
The growers themselves owned 18 million horses and mules, and millions more such animals were used in transportation, the Army, mining and other fields. Altogether there was at least one horse and mule for every four or even three people in the U.S.
A quarter of the country’s cropland was used to provide the animals with fodder.
And as the need for horses and mules declined, growers of grain couldn’t find enough buyers for their products. As a result, family farms seemingly just dried up and blew away.
Meanwhile, a bevy of technological ripples unleashed during the early years of the 20th century gradually merged into a tidal wave of new industries — steel mills, automobile factories, oil refineries, ship builders, coal processing plants, chemical plants and much more.
And yet, automation was something that millions of Americans worried about even in the late 1950s, when miners were replaced by machines and factory workers were laid off in droves because of increased mechanization.
Now, with the kind of vast technological revolution that the computer information age represents, there will doubtlessly be sweeping structural changes in the future that we cannot even begin to fathom.
How broadly these changes will affect us depends on the choices we make today.
There’s no question that technology, like the automobile of the early 20th century, is the vehicle of the future.
There’s an old Indian saying that seems to apply: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, it’s time to dismount.”
Some of us may not be interested in technology, but technology is interested in us.
Maybe it’s time we merged with the machine and became one traveler.