# What technology has reduced work the most? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 4, 2014, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843 "2014-03-04T18:20:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/61 "2014-03-06T02:04:39Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#): > > The Wheel. > The Sailboat. > The Steam Engine. What activities have these resulted in our spending less time on? ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/62 "2014-03-06T02:10:07Z")
Fire/cooking food. ---
**Author:** ![Suburban\_Plankton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/suburban_plankton/32/219_2.png) [@Suburban\_Plankton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Suburban_Plankton)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/63 "2014-03-06T02:17:09Z")
> [@OldGuy](#): > > This depends a lot on what you count. Take the printing press for example. If every copy of everything printed today was hand copied, it would likely take every waking hour of every person on earth. So the printing press has saved countless hours. Of course, without the printing press there would be a tiny fraction of the material now available. > > So do you count the hours saved to produce all we have now, or do you count the hours saved to produce at the level we did before? In the former case, it might well be the printing press, or it could be travel, as someone else mentioned. In the latter case, it likely is something agricultural, as there is obviously a certain minimum of food that needs production. I think that even if you take something agricultural. like the plow, you have the same problem as with the printing press. The plow made growing crops much easier. Which allowed people to grow more crops. Which allowed populations to expand. Without the plow, there’s no way we could grow enough food for the 7 billion people we have on the planet…but that’s OK, because there wouldn’t be 7 billion people; the population of the earth would be much lower because we would not have been able to grow enough food to expand it. So again, we can’t measure the ‘reduction of work’ based upon ‘current values’, because most of the work that’s been ‘saved’ simply would never have been ‘spent’ had technology not been developed to make it more efficient. In fact, one could argue that some of these technologies have actually increased work…my making it easier for one iteration of a task to be performed, they have enabled us to perform far more iterations than we would have been able to otherwise, and with automation to perform more work than would have been physically possible without technology. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/64 "2014-03-06T02:32:23Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Farming I can see, although that’s not a specific technology. Fighting? What? I was referring to war. (Sorry - I should have been more clear. ) ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/65 "2014-03-06T03:11:18Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > Are you suggesting that all families were a dozen before 1900 or so? i suggest the data shows otherwise. Even at the turn of the last century, a family of 8-10-11 was nationally noteworthy. > > Women have always been able to limit the number of children they had, at least to some degree. The only thing birth control brought was the ability to enjoy sex more or less separately from procreation. I was thinking a good deal further back. I’m not going from census data, just from a few genealogies. So feel free to say it’s hyperbole. But back in the early 1800’s you find families of 12 and in the 1700’s you get up to 18, with no particular comment of oddity. Of course, not all of the children reached adulthood and more than a few women died in childbirth before completing the set. Clearly not everyone was having this many. Not everyone was marrying and not everyone who married could have children. But there was a high enough mortality, especially among infants and children, that a woman who was able to bear children was likely to feel it was her duty to do so. You can say she should be limiting her family the way we would, with the thought that we must support each one to adulthood. But if she remembers, say, the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, in which 10% of Philadelphia died, she might decide that she, and her larger family, town, and state, could use a few more spares. ---
**Author:** ![Animastryfe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8797f3/32.png) [@Animastryfe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Animastryfe)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/66 "2014-03-06T03:12:43Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > I’m not sure that the technical definition of the jargon term “work” in physics is to be preferred in this thread over the ordinary language word “work” which was around first for physics to steal from… Indeed, but in the context of that particular discussion the technical definition of work was relevant. Edit: And yes, I do not see why we should not consider simple machines in this discussion. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/67 "2014-03-06T03:21:55Z")
> [@White SIFL](#): > > Fire/cooking food. Definitely not: prior to fire, we spent no time cooking food. > [@Suburban\_Plankton](#): > > I think that even if you take something agricultural. like the plow, you have the same problem as with the printing press. The plow made growing crops much easier. Which allowed people to grow more crops. Which allowed populations to expand. Without the plow, there’s no way we could grow enough food for the 7 billion people we have on the planet…but that’s OK, because there wouldn’t be 7 billion people; the population of the earth would be much lower because we would not have been able to grow enough food to expand it. I see what you’re saying, but the AVERAGE person spends less time planting seeds now than they did before the plow, don’t you think? > [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > I was referring to war. (Sorry - I should have been more clear. ) Is war the technology, in which case which activity are you referring to, or vice versa? ---
**Author:** ![Werekoala](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/7993a0/32.png) [@Werekoala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Werekoala)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/68 "2014-03-06T03:22:26Z")
Gunpowder/explosives. Mining Equipment (related to above). Harvesters (already noted above, but unbelievably important - look how tiny a percentage of the human race feeds the rest thanks to mechanical harvesters, among other things). Assembly Line production - this may be the overall #1 contender as it allowed the fast, efficient, affordable production of every other implement that has reduced the burden of time on all of humanityin the modern age. It’s not technically a technology, but a process, but still… ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/69 "2014-03-06T03:23:36Z")
> [@Animastryfe](#): > > Edit: And yes, I do not see why we should not consider simple machines in this discussion. By all means consider them–but think about what major work activity they’ve most reduced our time spent doing. Many, many uses of machines enable us to accomplish far more than we would without the machines, but we just use that capability to do more than we otherwise would. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/70 "2014-03-06T03:38:52Z")
Maybe here’s a way to think about it to avoid me telling people no so much: Imagine a community of 10,000 people. Imagine a kind of work (or if you prefer “labor”) done by folks in that community. Prior to the introduction of your technology, how many man-hours were spent each year engaging in that kind of labor by people in the community? After the technology’s introduction, how many man-hours were spent each year engaging in that kind of labor by people in the community? ---
**Author:** ![usedtobe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ec9cab/32.png) [@usedtobe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/usedtobe)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/71 "2014-03-06T04:03:01Z")
I love the cynicism being hinted at, so I’ll say it: Thermonuclear explosives. Make it MUCH easier to kill millions. Roman Legionnaires, Crusaders, Stalin, Hitler: eat your hearts out. One missile can do what you could never have even dreamed possible! ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/72 "2014-03-06T04:38:54Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Maybe here’s a way to think about it to avoid me telling people no so much: > > Imagine a community of 10,000 people. Imagine a kind of work (or if you prefer “labor”) done by folks in that community. > > Prior to the introduction of your technology, how many man-hours were spent each year engaging in that kind of labor by people in the community? > > After the technology’s introduction, how many man-hours were spent each year engaging in that kind of labor by people in the community? Yeah, that specific changes things for a lot of posts in this thread. Thanks for clarifying. I’ll change my answer to outsourcing to India.😃 ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/73 "2014-03-06T10:37:26Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#): > > The Wheel. > The Sailboat. > The Steam Engine. > [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > What activities have these resulted in our spending less time on? Wheel–less time/effort hauling things. Sailboat–rowing sucks, & sails are faster. Steam engine–does the labor for you (except for shoveling fuel). ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/74 "2014-03-06T10:56:09Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Definitely not: prior to fire, we spent no time cooking food. Yeah, but we probably spent a heck of a lot of time squatting behind bushes with the raging trots. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/75 "2014-03-06T16:17:38Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > Thermonuclear explosives. > > Make it MUCH easier to kill millions. > > Roman Legionnaires, Crusaders, Stalin, Hitler: eat your hearts out. One missile can do what you could never have even dreamed possible! This might make sense, but I’m not sure. Certainly we spend a lot less time engaged in homicide, on average, than people did a thousand years ago (according to Steven Pinker, anyway). But I’m not convinced that this reduction in time spent killing one another can be significantly traced to nukes. > [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#): > > Wheel–less time/effort hauling things. > > Sailboat–rowing sucks, & sails are faster. > > Steam engine–does the labor for you (except for shoveling fuel). None of these qualify. We spend a huge amount of time hauling things; we just haul things a lot further. Wheels have enabled us to move strawberries thousands of miles before they’re eaten; that just means we do a lot more hauling. Same ideas apply to your other proposals. > [@Colophon](#): > > Yeah, but we probably spent a heck of a lot of time squatting behind bushes with the raging trots. Cooking food=less time pooping? Intriguing. ---
**Author:** ![gazpacho](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6f9a4e/32.png) [@gazpacho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gazpacho)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/76 "2014-03-06T16:32:03Z")
> [@Colophon](#): > > Yeah, but we probably spent a heck of a lot of time squatting behind bushes with the raging trots. While thanks to good health care and reasonably well enforced health codes and cooking we might get sick from food borne less than our hunter gather ancestors I would not put money down on it. Most food borne illnesses stem from raising food and living in crowed conditions. Cooking has greatly expanded what we can eat and I would not want to give it up but I don’t think it cuts down on work. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/77 "2014-03-06T16:59:38Z")
> [@elbows](#): > > I was going to say the washing machine. But on reflection, I’m going to say trucks. > > Yeah, the engine was a nice invention and a car is a pretty labour reducing thing, but trucks, they really make the world go round, all around the world, when you think about it. > > Tons and tons of labor saved by the truck, I think! There are other technologies that save more work in manufacturing, but if we talk about the home and the opportunities women get as a result, (that traditionally did the bulk of the laundry work), the washing machine gets my vote. Hans Rosling makes a great case for it in this TED talk: > **[The magic washing machine](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_machine)** > > What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring... ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2014, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/78 "2014-03-06T17:22:32Z")
> [@Colophon](#): > > Yeah, but we probably spent a heck of a lot of time squatting behind bushes with the raging trots. Funny, but I doubt it. What makes us sick most of the time is contamination from our own waste bacteria, and I have no trouble visualizing that earlier man was more adapted to his own diet - such contamination included. Not that I’m in any way knocking the inventions of fire and cooking. Except that they still haven’t mastered the latter up here; they don’t want to overuse that newfangled fire thing. ---
**Author:** ![Cub\_Mistress](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea666f/32.png) [@Cub\_Mistress](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cub_Mistress)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2014, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/79 "2014-03-07T02:03:25Z")
> [@Zsofia](#): > > I’m still going with laundry devices - washing machines, particularly, although dryers are nice too. Laundry used to be a HUGE part of a woman’s weekly work - it was one of the most strenuous things a housewife had to do, and it was never-ending. A s I understand it, laundry was one day for washing then another day for drying and a third day for ironing. now ALL we have to do is push a button and transfer to dryer. When a folding and putting-away machine is devised, we will be golden:D ---
**Author:** ![wheresmymind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/91b2a8/32.png) [@wheresmymind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wheresmymind)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2014, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843/80 "2014-03-07T02:59:35Z")
My vote goes to the combine. Reaping an acre of wheat might take two men a solid days work, about 20-24 man-hours. The resulting 20 bushels of grain would then require another 20 man-hours to thresh, and another few hours to winnow. So you’re looking at ~40-50 man-hours per acre to go from standing wheat to grain ready for the mill. A modern combine operated by one person can reap, thresh, and winnow ~50 acres per hour, or about 70 man-_seconds_ per acre. That’s roughly 2500 times faster. A century and a half ago ~80-90% of families in the US were engaged in farming, with everyone pitching in and working 12-16 hour days at harvest time. Today less than 5% of families in the US are engaged in farming, the work for those families is much easier, and we produce so much food that we export much of it, and sometimes pay families NOT to farm. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-technology-has-reduced-work-the-most/682843.md?page=5)