What activities have these resulted in our spending less time on?
Fire/cooking food.
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.
I was referring to war. (Sorry - I should have been more clear. )
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.
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.
Definitely not: prior to fire, we spent no time cooking food.
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?
Is war the technology, in which case which activity are you referring to, or vice versa?
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…
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.
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?
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!
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.
Wheel–less time/effort hauling things.
Sailboat–rowing sucks, & sails are faster.
Steam engine–does the labor for you (except for shoveling fuel).
Yeah, but we probably spent a heck of a lot of time squatting behind bushes with the raging trots.
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.
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.
Cooking food=less time pooping? Intriguing.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.