What the Steam Engine Can Tell Us About the Future of Social Data
We know that the spread of computers into everyday life has changed the world around us in dramatic ways. The metaphor people often use is that we’re going through another Industrial Revolution. In the same way that the steam engine upended the economy of the 19th century, so too will the proliferation of social data change the economy of the 21st century.
We used to think that the Industrial Revolution was a sudden explosion of growth and invention — all at once a “wave of gadgets” sweeping over Britain in the space of a few years. But that’s not true. Economic historians found that there was no ‘take off’ in the British economy, instead the economy grew slowly and steadily for the century or so before the Industrial Revolution. We get the same story when we look at the technology of the ‘leading sectors’ of the Industrial Revolution,. There wasn’t a single genius invention that changed everything, instead the slow iteration of inventions over generations that over time aggregated to an unrecognizable world.
Let’s look at the steam engine. When you think of the Industrial Revolution, you’re probably thinking of coal-powered steam engines: mills, locomotives, and steam ships. But functioning coal-powered steam engines were around for at least a generation before we get these huge economy-changing inventions. The first major steam engine was invented by an obscure ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen in the early 18th century. These were huge machines which transformed heat from coal into up and down motion. They were expensive, massive, and hugely inefficient, and difficult to build and maintain.
The Newcomen engine was not a dead-end curiosity, however. It found great practical utility in coal mining. Coal mining was big business in those days, because people throughout Britain relied on coal to heat their houses. People who owned coal mines needed to get coal out of the ground so they could sell it to these cold consumers. Luckily, there was a lot of easily accessible coal in Britain. But when miners dug deep enough, they would hit the water table, flooding the mine. Miners needed to invest in expensive pumping machinery to drain deeper and deeper mines. Before the Newcomen engine, this was done by people or horses working a treadmill, which was obviously expensive and difficult, limiting the depth to which mines could be sunk. The Newcomen engine revolutionized mine drainage, allowing mine owners to dig deeper and deeper mines, keeping British houses warm in winter and British skies smoky all year round.
The vast bulk of coal’s cost came from transportation. At the pithead, its cost was close to zero. This was what made the Newcomen engine economic: it didn’t matter that the Newcomen engine was incredibly fuel hungry because fuel was close to free. People didn’t have much incentive to improve its efficiency either — why spend money and time tinkering with your engine when you’d be saving basically no money at all from your efficiency gains?
It would take a number of other innovations to made the steam engine change the world: first those made by James Watt and Matthew Bolton that allowed more efficient steam power to move in circles, and thus power machinery; and later the development of much more efficient high-pressure steam engines that would lead to innovations like the steam locomotive. These cumulative innovations were important in that by making the steam engine more efficient, they allowed it to be used far away from the point of coal production. They meant that energy from coal could be used anywhere — not just at the coal pit — but in factories, in houses, even in the deep ocean. It was this development that made the Industrial Revolution: when steam power could be used far away from energy sources.
When we analogize between our time and the Industrial Revolution, we often think that the process has more or less completed. That when we look around at the changes that have happened over our lifetimes — laptops, smartphones, cloud computing, remote work — that we’re looking at the end of the story. But the lesson of the slow Industrial Revolution is that we’re wrong.
We’re not at the end of the story. It’s more like we’re at the time of Newcomen — or more likely the time of Watt. We are still using data primarily at the site of production where it is extremely cheap and ubiquitous. We are still stuck at the metaphorical pithead: our data is still coming from interactions mainly on screens, in apps, with immaterial stuff. The real revolution — the real change — is still to come, when the cost of gathering data decreases to the point where it spreads to more and more domains — where we figure out how to move social data away from our screens and out into the world.
How will this happen? It’s useful here to see what happened to steam engine after Watt. James Watt was an inventive genius. He took the Newcomen engine and over the course of his career improved it in just about every way imaginable. For his pains, he had a series of patents on his inventions, which allowed him and his business partners a comfortable life.
But Watt for all of his genius had his untested assumptions that held back the development of the steam engine. One of his assumptions was that it was really dangerous to experiment with ‘high pressure’ steam engines. He had some experience with this: high pressure engines could explode, destroying workshops and potentially killing people. Because of his own anxiety about the risk of experimenting with high pressure steam, Watt refused to do so. And because he sat on all the patents, nobody else could work with high pressure steam and validate his assumptions.
In the early 19th century the engineer Richard Trevithick started to experiment with high pressure steam in Cornwall. Cornwall had no coalfields, and so coal was very expensive, which meant Cornish engineers had more cause to seek efficient energy use. What Trevithick found was that high pressure was not particularly dangerous — and it was much more efficient, and could make the engines themselves much smaller. It was this reduction in size that made steam powered transport possible. But it would only take other engineers after the death of Watt and the lapse of his patents to really deliver on the power of high pressure steam and make the first steam-powered locomotives.
Looking at the situation today, the good news is that there’s a lot of space for innovators and entrepreneurs to push marginal improvements in efficiency in the collection and analysis of social data to new business problems. There will remain opportunity for a long time — great opportunity — to completely upend the way that we live, work, and play — because all of these domains will likely be upended by the expansion of social data.
This change will likely come by violating the assumptions and boundaries that many of the people in power today hold sacred. Just as the steam engine could only develop when people were able to try to invalidate the assumptions of Watt and others that high pressure steam was dangerous, there will be a new generation of disruptors who may make advances by violating strongly held norms. These may be around privacy, about equity, or about the limits of social control. But they will be tested — and many of them will fall to the wayside.
The bad news is that the big change will lead to a great deal of individual pain and social upheaval. The geniuses of the Industrial Revolutions were great at figuring out their technology, but they were insensitive to the massive social problems that their machines caused. They believed — certainly wrongly — that the people who technology left behind deserved their fate, and they could simply improve their lot through hard work. They believed — perhaps correctly — that the good they did by advancing technology was worth the pain it had caused.
The next generation will experience completely new problems because of the proliferation of social data. In the Industrial Revolution, the moral compass of inventors and business owners failed: they allowed their new machines to chew through generations of workers, and they allowed the benefits of this prosperity to become greatly unevenly distributed. The next generation of leaders and thinkers are going to have to confront a much bigger challenge, and it is unclear whether we have the moral judgement to do so well.
