Every Technological Change has Unintended Consequences

Prologue: Agricuture

The practice that gave us civilization, also challenged us as individuals:

Eleven thousand years ago, absolutely no one grew their own food. Instead they lived off of wild game, fish, and plants. Today only a tiny handful of people continue to live this way. Instead we live off of food that we cultivate deliberately or that someone else cultivates for us. Indeed, by the time everyone in this room is dead, there will probably be no primarily hunting and gathering cultures left. Their members will have dispersed and been assimilated by agricultural cultures.


Origins of Agriculture:

Why did this change occur? After all, humans had done nicely as hunter/gatherers for many millenia.

A synthesis of current anthropological, archeological, and historical data that suggests something like this.

Advantages of food production:


The drawback of agriculture

People raised on a monoculture of a small number of high-carbohydrate staples (wheat, rice, manioc, corn potatoes, or whatever grew locally) were significantly malnourished compared to hunter-gatherers with a varied diet. Consider:

The type of healthy diet for which the human body evolved was a luxury available only to the very wealthy.


Agriculture, thus, not only has immediate benefits, cultures that adopt it soon find that they can't back away from it without:

In short, they have been thrust from the Garden of Eden and are stuck with a back-breaking life style that will leave them stunted and feeble as individuals but highly competitive as societies.


The global economy does not restore everything to the way it was:

But we obviously don't suffer from these problems: What has changed?

That requires us to consider a second great invention: Sailing.


Predynastic Egypt: Boat under sail 3500 BCE
Sailing commerce and security: We'll skip the details of the early history of sailing vessels. For most of their history, sea-going vessels combined sail and oar power (E.G. ancient Egyptian sea-going ship). This was: By the time of classical antiquity, however, that had changed. Under the Roman Empire, Mediterranean society was unified and organized such that:

The fall of the Roman Empire set maritime progress back for centuries, but by the fifteenth century European and Chinese (right) ships were making unprecedented voyages of discovery in ships that rivaled their Roman predecessors. Within a century, ships were transporting goods across the Atlantic and Pacific with a degree of security and reliability like the ancient Mediterranean. The result was a global economy in which:


The result: A gradual increase in human health. At first, exotic crops became established in new countries, but by the mid 19th century, actual perishable produce could be shipped between continents. A global food economy enabled most of us to return to the kind of healthy diet for which our bodies evolved. (Stature, at right, is a good first-order proxy.)

Problem solved? Perhaps, but the solution spawned more problems...

Future shock I: Global economy transforms global ecology:

The Columbian Exchange Starting in 1492, entire suites of exotic plants and animals were exchanged between the New and Old Worlds, seriously disrupting ecosystems. The effects could be subtle but started immediately. For example, immense flocks of passenger pigeons (right) witnessed during the nineteenth century apparently didn't occur prior to 1492 (judging from archeological remains of Indian kitchen refuse.) Evidently some change wrought by the Columbian Exchange released them from their historic ecological limits.

Other changes were more direct: 17th through 19th centuries - Large-scale hunting and extinctions as Europeans colonized the world, introducing more potent methods of hunting and converting large regions to agriculture. E.G. the:


Future shock II: Global commerce leads to alcoholism, spouse abuse, and crime.

Brandy: The technique of distilling liquor was known from classical antiquity but it was only with the dawn of the global economy in the 16th century that this difficult procedure was applied on a large scale. What had changed?

Wouldn't it be nice if it could be concentrated by distillation? Just during shipment? The original brandy ("gebrande wijn" or "burned wine" in Dutch) was actually intended to be reconstituted with water at the receiving end. Soon, people were enjoying it straight, and experimenting with distilled spirits derived from grains, potatoes, agave, and other sources.

Alas, although people in many regions have been drinking beer and wine for millenia, and have evolved resistance to its most dangerous effects, no population has had time to evolve tolerance for concentrated alcoholic beverages. As the global economy provided access to distilled spirits, their public health effects, including increased alcoholism, became more intense.

Alcoholism as a women's rights issue: In the 18th and 19th century United States, this problem was compounded by two social institutions:

As a result, a wife would have no control over an alcoholic husband who chose to drink their common income away. This, over and above the more familiar liabilities of having an alcoholic spouse.

Temperance: In a society where the legal empowerment of women was still far off, the obvious solution seemed to be to enforce good spousal behavior by limiting access to alcohol and shutting down saloons - the temperance movement, pursued by organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In fact, many activists who would later figure in the women's suffrage movement got their initiation in the temperance movement. Additional complexities included:


Prohibition: The issue came to a head in nineteen-teens when:

A constitutional amendment outlawing alcoholic beverages was suddenly actually politically feasible. The 18th amendment went into effect in 1920, banning the sale of most alcoholic beverages. We know the result: Although the public supported prohibition and public health did improve under it, it could not be enforced. The results included: Afterthought: Coupled with the effects of the great depression, prohibition seemed like a terrible failure. Prohibition was repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933. You have to wonder what would have happened if temperance leaders had focused on the big problem of distilled spirits instead of trying to legislate away beer and wine, too.



Future shock III: Coal power and empires - the means dictate the purpose

Why do we even have empires? Starting in the 15th century, European powers began to develop colonial empires. Exact reasons varied but they usually centered on:

Strategic considerations of location took second place. During the 19th century, this changed. What happened?

The global economy thrives on security. For commercial vessels, that security was, for centuries, provided by sailing warships bristling with heavy cannons. The warships themselves had to provide their own security. That meant being heavily armed with cannons that could fire at an enemy approaching from any direction. Necessary because one couldn't depend on the wind. Sailing navies longed to break free of their dependence on the wind like their predecessors in lighter oar-driven warships had been prior to the age of gunpowder. Then it happened.


The steam engine steam engines became available as an auxiliary power source, navies scrambled to use them. By the time of the Civil War, a first rate warship like the CSS Alabama (right) would cruise under sail but fight, or maneuver in port under steam power that turned a propeller. For sea-going commercial vessels that could expect tug-boat service in port and didn't need to be weighed-down by a steam engine, pure sail remained the standard.

But surprise - steam engines need fuel: In the mid-19th century, pure steamships were limited in range because of their need for fuel, and were used near the coast and on rivers. Still, the deployment of ironclad steam warships during the Civil War got navies thinking about the desirability of ocean-going steam ironclads.

The problem: Steam warships consumed prodigious amounts of coal and needed frequent resupply. The first ocean-going ironclad crossed the Atlantic in 1864, but such a ship could do little upon arrival until refueled. Alas, as armor and guns became more powerful, warships with sailing rigging were increasingly vulnerable, but switching navies over to steam power would require nations to develop global networks of well defended fueling stations. The HMS Captain 1869 (right) represents the last serious attempt by any navy to build a fully modern sailing warship. Its innovative design separated the gun turrets and rigging on separate decks. Unfortunately its design and construction had been poorly supervised and it was heavier and had a higher center of gravity than planned. It capsized and sank in heavy weather during its first year of operation. This event did for the image of sailing warships what the crash of the Hindenburg did for that of airships. The global powers took the steam plunge.

Power warships and the price of strength: By the 20th century, naval ships (E.G., the HMS Dreadnought - right) were powerful steam-powered steel-hulled monsters. But there was a price for this modernity. Consider: In WWII, the Bismark, one of the most powerful battleships ever built, on its first combat mission, was severely limited in its operational scope and ultimately trapped and destroyed because of its need to reach a friendly port for refueling. Compare that to the CSS Shenandoah, which was operating in the north Pacific when its crew learned of the end of the Civil War, then sailed non-stop and undetected by U.S. authorities to surrender to the British in Liverpool.

Game change: The biggest change was in the colonial powers' rationale for having colonies at all. Now their largest role was to provide a global network of fueling stations for their navies. Indeed, even when former colonies became independent during the 20th century, colonial powers tended to retain control of strategic bases.

Sailing commerce and security II: The switch to steam-powered warships didn't effect sailing commerce. Indeed, the Thomas W Lawson (right), the largest pure sailing vessel in history, was launched in 1902. As in the ancient Mediterranean, however, sail-propelled commerce required security. The breakdown of global security in World War I put an end to such vessels, which were very easy visible targets for steam warships and submarines. In response, freighters became steam or petroleum powered, for rapid passages and in WWII, to keep up with convoys.

Future shock IV: 20th century industry and "a woman's place."

Remember the women of the 19th century temperance movements? Many, including Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, went on to campaign for women's suffrage. In 1919 women received the right to vote, however at the time of Merck's birth, most middle class women were home-makers of some stripe. That was despite:

But this all occurred in a broader context: The 20th century saw the rise of industries dedicated to manufacturing labor-saving devices that took many hours off of a home-maker's work week. By 1959, this was a source of American national pride and was featured front and center at the 1959 American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow, where it: Of course Frigidaire, Hoover, Amana, GE, etc. were not following a long-term plan for the restructuring of society. They were just selling stuff. What were their long-term effects?

That exhibition became the prop for the famous impromptu Kitchen Debates between US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that began when Khrushchev, while being given a tour of the exhibit of a modern middle-class American home, prodded his host into a wide ranging debate about the relative merits of the US and Soviet systems. Khrushchev raised at least one point with some merit, pointing out that in the Soviet Union women were integrated more fully into public life and weren't patronized by a system that required them to be pampered housewives.

In fact, as of 1959:

During the 1960s and 70s, matters came to a head:

And by 1980, women had moved into the professional workforce in large numbers.

Postscript: The really big future shock

SGC exists to address what may be the biggest unintended consequence of our era: Anthropogenic Global Climate Change. This is the unintended result of the well-intentioned efforts of industry (capitalist and planned) to provide for society's needs. Our efforts to mitigate it and adapt to it will involve new technologies with their own inevitable future shocks. Some harbingers:

As you pursue your search for solutions, try to anticipate the unanticipated effects they will invoke.