So while the motive power of animals, in this case horses, characterised the technology and energy model of another age, the most advanced economies wouldn’t reach ‘peak horse ’ until the early twentieth century. The United States, which by that time had become the world’s largest and most advanced economy, wouldn’t reach its apogee until 1915 when over 26 million horses lived and worked alongside humans. Within just a few decades, however, they would disappear from the world of work, substituted in a range of tasks by machines which were more reliable, didn’t get sick and, most importantly, led to far greater productivity. Paradoxical as it might seem, we employed animals like never before at the very moment they were becoming obsolete.
This was a theme returned to in 1983 by the Nobel Prize– winning economist Wassily Leontief. For Leontief, human labour in the twenty-first century would come to resemble horses at the turn of the twentieth. Now, as then, a key source of value-creation and wealth would become obsolete:
Computers and robots [will] replace humans in the exercise of mental functions in the same way as mechanical power replaced them in the performance of physical tasks. As time goes on, more and more complex mental functions will be performed by machines … this means that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish—in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
If Leontief is right, then many of the problems we presently view as intractable may, within a few short decades, seem as outlandish to the next generation as London sinking in excrement does to us.
Full Automation
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