The New Domestic Revolution
In ancient Greece and Rome a leisured class could pursue philosophy, politics and the arts because slaves did the work. They ran the farms and the households, cooked the meals, made the wine and provided the transport. Two slaves of the Emperor Claudius, Pallas and Narcissus, ran the empire itself. Leisure existed, but it rested on the forced labour of others, and it was confined to the few.
A similar transformation happened much more recently, and to far more people, without anyone being enslaved at all. It happened in the twentieth century, in the ordinary home.
Before the washing machine, doing the laundry for a family could take the best part of a day: hauling water, heating it, scrubbing, wringing, hanging out to dry. Before the vacuum cleaner, carpets were beaten by hand. Before the dishwasher, someone stood at a sink after every meal. This work fell overwhelmingly on women, and it consumed a huge share of their waking lives.
Economic historians who have measured it find that the time needed for core household tasks fell dramatically across the century, as machines took over jobs that had previously required hours of manual labour each day.
That change did not happen because factory owners decided to be generous. It happened because machines became cheaper and better, manufacturers competed to sell them, and the saving in time and effort passed overwhelmingly to the households that bought them.
The washing machine did not enrich its inventor anywhere near as much as it enriched the millions of people who no longer had to spend their mornings at a washboard. This is the ordinary pattern of technological progress. William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on economics, once measured how the gains from innovation are split between the people who produce it and the people who consume it.
He found that innovators typically keep only a small fraction of the value they create, of the order of two or three per cent. The rest, the overwhelming rest, flows to the public in the form of cheaper goods, better products, and time given back.
The washing machine was not an isolated case. It was one instance of a general rule: machines that take over necessary work free the people who used to do it, and they free far more people than the machine's inventor could ever employ directly.
We are now entering a new phase of the same process, and it is set to be larger than anything that came before. Robots and artificial intelligence are beginning to do the work that used to require a person. The do the driving, translating, drafting documents, diagnosing illness, managing logistics, even a great deal of thinking and analysis.
If the pattern that applied to the washing machine applies here too, and there is no obvious reason it should not, then the gains will not pool into a small class of machine-owners while everyone else stands idle. They will do what they have always done, spread outward, mostly as falling costs and improving goods, to nearly everyone.
The washing machine liberated women from hours of domestic drudgery every week. Automation promises something of the same kind, but general, not confined to the household and not confined to one sex. It offers the prospect of liberating people generally from the necessary but unrewarding parts of work, the parts that are repetitive, effortful, or simply take up time that could be better spent.
What followed liberation from washboards was not idleness. Women freed from domestic drudgery moved in enormous numbers into paid work, education, politics, and public life, reshaping the twentieth century as they did so. Nobody in 1900 could have predicted the shape that change would take, and nobody today can predict exactly what people will do with the time and income that automation frees up.
But the historical precedent points one way. When machines took over necessary work before, people did not sit and stare at the wall. They found new things to do, many of which had not existed before the labour was freed up to do them.
Competition is what drives the gains outward. A firm that automates and cuts its costs cannot simply pocket the saving, because a rival will automate too, undercut its prices, and force the saving out into the market as cheaper goods. This has happened again and again, from the spinning jenny to the washing machine to the smartphone, and there is no reason unique to robots or AI that should stop it happening again.
The Greeks and Romans built their leisure on the backs of people who had no choice in the matter, and their leisure was reserved for a few. The twentieth century built a smaller version of the same liberation into the home, through machines, and it was not reserved for a few. It changed the daily life of practically every household that could afford a washing machine, and within a generation or two, that meant nearly everyone.
The twenty-first century has the chance to do this again, more completely and more widely than before. If it follows the pattern of the washing machine rather than the pattern of the Roman villa, it will be a golden change. It will not be leisure resting on servitude, and not leisure confined to an owning class, but time and possibility handed back to almost everyone, the way it was handed back to the woman who no longer had to spend her Monday at the washboard.
We are moving into a new slave economy, with slaves we have manufacturedinstead of people we have enslaved. And just as this leisure led to an astonishing outgrowth of culture and the arts in Greece and Rome, so will it usher in another era of human achievement. Some will seek challenge and adventure. Some will find fulfilment in the arts. And it will be the new slaves that make all this possible. Bring it on.
Madsen Pirie