How the Industrial Revolution Changed Society: A Mixed Blessing

About 300-400 years ago, human lives started to change dramatically: The Industrial Revolution was exported from Europe to all the “primitive” agrarian societies of the world, changing society in unthinkable ways. In some way or another, the ways we produce, consume and govern were never the same again. Technology’s massive influence on society began. This influence only got stronger in time.

A few yesterdays ago, it was zippers. Today, generative artificial intelligence. Tomorrow, robots, perhaps.

How did the Industrial Revolution change society? There’s no simple answer to this question. I can’t say, for the worse, because it enabled more humans to exist. The human population saw enormous growth after the Industrial Revolution, thanks to better public health systems and advances in modern medicine. However, it also brought us a plethora of issues we still haven’t rectified today.

A mixed blessing

First off, the Industrial Revolution gave us more black moths. Could this be counted as its sole positive contribution to biodiversity? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is this: The Industrial Revolution has destroyed global ecosystems and drove climate systems crazy.

Now, the erratic weather patterns, accompanied by storms, floods and droughts threaten nearly all societies worldwide, largely thanks to the Industrial Revolution and what followed. Many people live longer, safer lives thanks to it.

Living in a consumer society shaped by a free economy, we have a lot of reasons to thank modern companies with state-of-the-art production facilities. However, we must not forget: As a rule, when companies can substitute machines for people, they will. The Luddites protested this in the 1810s from their closed-down weaver’s workshops; about 47% of U.S. knowledge workers (as found in an Oxford study from 2013) may do so soon.

The Industrial Revolution is a mixed blessing. It needs to be rethought with sustainability and human rights in mind.

The Classical Narrative of Industrial Revolution in Western Societies

Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was dominated by the scientific know-how and optimism of the Enlightenment. It was just the right time and the right place for groups of positivist men to rethink new ways of production, organization and trade to ultimately change society.

In Glasgow, James Watt worked on making the Newcomen Steam Engine more efficient. His commercial success in the 1770s was crucial in shaping the next century.

From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, first published in Scotland in 1776, an argument on why organizing production in smaller scale facilities makes people stupid and ignorant:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Government officials and businessmen made sure there were measures in place to make trade easier. William Huskisson was a member of the British Parliament in the 1820s (and previously the President of the Board of Trade) responsible for securing continued investment into linking English trade hubs like Manchester and Liverpool through railways. In a cruel twist of fate, he also later became known as the world’s first widely reported railway casualty.

Around the mid-19th century, Europeans had reached new peaks in civilization where urban working classes spent their lives in modern factories to create abundances of shiny products. Engineers like Watt, thinkers like Smith, tradesmen like Huskisson and the likes of them enabled this revolution; with big help from human creativity that continued to push boundaries in technology, deepening inequalities driving a human condition where a lot had to make do with wage labor and, last but not least, fossil fuel.

Protesters of Industrial Revolution

For the proponents of the Industrial Revolution, it was all about progress with technological advancement and economic liberalization at heart. In his 1750 essay Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that glorifies simple living amidst nature, the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is perhaps one of the first protesters of Industrial Revolutionists’ purchase-power fueled civilization fantasies.

In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels, hailing from Germany, analyzes who benefits more from wage labor:

The wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labor-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labor is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket.

Further, thinkers like Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, William Wordsworth, and John Muir were known to critique at least some ideas within the Industrial Revolution. As time raged on, we got to know other, more violent protesters like Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski, also known as Unabomber, was a U.S. mathematics professor who started mail-bombing people in the 1970s who he thought were advancing modern technology in the name of his “fight” against industrialization. His acts of violence dismembered, killed, and hurt many people. In contrast to these antisocial actions stood the following words penned by him in his 1995 manifesto, trying to shed light on the forced constraints of human condition of our era:

A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity, and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

What Will Be the Next Technological Evolution?

The Industrial Revolution didn’t only change how our days are nine-to-fived throughout the global society. It also changed what it means to be a physically and mentally healthy human. Now, with advances in artificial intelligence, our perception of “humanness” is also changing.

Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of humans after five minutes of conversation, making them mistake the computer for human. Scolded for being a publicity stunt in the 1990s, the Loebner Prize awarded such computers, selecting the Most Human Computers of every year. In 2023, it’s safe to say that we now have ‘Most Human Computers’ everywhere. \We still have time to agree on some things before another revolution gains full swing.

Think about electricity; the circuit and all the basic technology were developed in the 1880s and another century had to pass for its global adoption.

Think about computers; they were conceptually developed to a satisfactory maturity in the 1950s. Yet, they weren’t in homes worldwide until after the 1990s. With the Internet, there’s still hope.

With AI too, we still have time to make sure we let this new revolution run at controlled, ethical and humane speeds.