ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Women and Technology w/ Katrine Marçal

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Throughout history, countless good ideas have been side-lined or dismissed because they were put forward by women. That’s the frustration which motivates historian Katrine Marçal, who delves into her myth-busting research for a Microdose all about technology’s missed turnings. With ACFM host Nadia Idle, the author of Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM. I'm Nadia Idol and today joining me for a chat about all things technology is the award-winning. finance journalist and writer Katrina Mercer. Katrine's first book, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner, has been translated into more than 20 languages. But it's your latest book, The Mother of Invention, How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men, which we will be focusing on today. Catherine, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I thoroughly enjoyed this fun, fact-filled, the illuminating book, and it tackles everything from cars to sewing through to computers. But before going into some of those subjects and talking about technology and the different effects

those have had on the world, also on women, and how they came about, I'd first like to ask you what drove you to write a book about technology. I guess it was my mother, actually, who, when she got pregnant with me, I am Swedish, so this was in Sweden in the early 80s. She decided that she wanted a more stable career. She had worked at an art gallery a bit and then with the administration of library catalogs. So she decided to do something which was still a natural thing to do for somebody with her background. She went and studied computer science and became a computer programmer. So in that sense, I did grow up in the tech industry, but it was of course quite different because computer programming was still quite female dominated. It's shifted

in the 80s, but I still remember most of my mother's managers being women. And then, obviously, I saw all of this change. And when my mother retired, a few years back, it was a completely different industry and computer programming had gone from female-dominated, the first programmers having been women, women having invented software and all of these things, to being very male-dominated. And a lot of things had happened with the status and the pay as well, more men better pay higher status.

And as somebody who wrote about economics and money and these sort of things, it was something that fascinated me, this connection between gender and pay and what gets to find as technology and not. And that is a big theme of this book, Mother of Invention. That's fascinating. So actually the impetus was something that you experienced in your life with your own mother and sort of her journey,

almost in the different employment yourself. So that's really interesting. That's great to have started because you never know when you ask people why they wrote a book. Sometimes people come up with all sorts of different things. So it's great to hear the story directly from you. So I mean, are there several ways that we can start having this discussion? There's so much in the book I want to ask about.

But maybe let's start with the big proposal that is the pitch on the back of the book. Why did it take 5,000 years to put a, wheel on a suitcase. I was fascinated. I'm sure our listeners would want to hear that story as well. Yeah, it is fascinating. It's sort of, it's a classic mystery of innovation, often in economics, so it's been talked about for a long time, because obviously the wheel was invented 5,000 years ago or something. And then we've applied the technology of the wheel to a lot of things, cars and carriages and bicycles and ferries wheels and whatnot. And, but there's a a very famous exception to this rule that whenever we have to transport something heavy

from point A to point B, we tend to make this easier using the technology of the wheel. And that exception is the suitcase because the first commercially successful patent for a suitcase with wheels was first came in 1972. And suitcases with wheels were not common until late 1980s, early 1990s. so it did take five thousand years to put wheels on suitcases and this is something that many economists or management thinkers on innovation have been pointing out this paradox you know how come that we put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases and they have not really had a good explanation to this and i i found

the real reason to to why this was the case and it has to do with with gender and gender bias Because there was this idea that no man would ever roll a suitcase. It was considered unmanly. Mascality is this thing that always has to be proven, right? And one way that men were expected to prove that they were real men was by carrying heavy things. So the industry assumed that wheels on suitcases would never sell because they thought of their consumers as almost exclusively men. Women were not assumed to travel very much. And if a woman traveled, she would not do.

do it alone. And these ideas about, you know, this gender bias was actually the main reason to why the industry didn't see the potential of this product. There were products before 1972 applying the technology of the wheel to the suitcase, but they were all niche products for women and nobody really took them seriously or saw them as something to invest in or something that would then eventually go on and disrupt the whole global luggage industry, which is what happened. And then the suitcase with wheels took off in the 80s,

obviously when we had in many parts of the world big changes on the labor market with a lot of women moving from informal to formal labor and women starting to go on business trips to a larger extent, hence traveling alone. And they were the first sort of adopters of this suitcase with wheels. And eventually the men followed. And now I think most people probably will, say that a suitcases with wheels is more associated with the businessman, right, than a woman. So it has really changed.

And one of the fascinating things that you bring up in relation to that is how over history, there are points where you look back at something and it looks just completely strange and mental. Like, how could you not put wheels in a suitcase? But at the time, you exist within this framework and this discourse. And, you know, a set of ideological practices that. make it completely sensible that putting a wheel on a suitcase is ridiculous. And I found that fascinating as an idea because I then thought, well, how many things have not been invented or have

been reinvented or have, you know, started and stopped and started and stopped? I was thinking about my first suitcase, which definitely had the wheels on the short end, which I thought, well, this is very strange. Like, I was dragging it the long way around. And it doesn't seem to make sense that I'm now thinking back at it, but of course it made sense at the time that you wouldn't put wheels on a suitcase. So another thing that you talk about, which is another fantastic example, is which I knew nothing about, was the electric car, which I assumed was a recent invention, but it's not. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yes, electric cars are very old. So here in London, in the late 1800s, you could phone up an electric taxi company and they would

come and pick you up if you had the money obviously but so they were around this technology was around at the dawn of the automobile era and then they disappeared and what I focus on in the book is the fact that electric cars were quite heavily marketed to women to wealthy women because there was this assumption that a car that was more comfortable which the electric was much less dangerous quiet, safer, bit slower was a feminine car. So it was for women. And the ads for electric cars from this period are amazing. There's these sort of women in long skirts and big hats getting into these vehicles. But because they were associated with femininity were almost not even seen as cars. They were almost seen as these drawing rooms on wheels, sort of like an extension

of the feminine sphere of the home, but rolling around the city centre. So I talk about this in the book because this was something that contributed to electric cars and disappearing in us building a whole world for petrol-driven technology, which we now regret for obvious reasons.

But because these electric cars were seen as feminine, many male consumers ended up not wanting it because we have this idea if something is seen as, you know, for women or for girls, it's less than, it's inferior to what's for men. And this became a commercial problem, sort of by 1916 or something like that, particularly on the American market, the electric car industry was complaining about how their product was seen as this thing for the elderly and the women and not cutting-edge technology of the future.

So this wasn't the main reason to why electric cars disappeared, but it certainly contributed. And I talk about that as a form of sexism and gender bias that prevented us from seeing the potential of electric car technology. We could have done that 100 years earlier, and we probably would have been in much less trouble at the moment. And is that because you talk a little bit about this, but is it because alongside the invention of,

you know, the electric car, there was also the invention of the motor car and how the motor car developed. And I think you talk about it a bit and how, you know, the danger of having the, you know, the motor explode in your face and having to crank it up and the and the oil and the gas. I mean, is it, is it, are you kind of, this is the suggestion that because of industry and work and mechanization and all of the, you know, and work being, you know, the male domain, that effectively the kind of the natural, or it was viewed to be the natural progression from that was technologies that were built down that aesthetic and that the electric car actually sat outside that. So for men, which were the main consumers in this

case, it was difficult to market that kind of shift? Or is it difficult to trace this sort of stuff and we can just observe it. No, I do, I do think, I mean, I certainly think that the electric car industry, they made a mistake in a way, marketing so heavily to women because most families could only afford one car. I mean, the car, the automobile also went from like a real luxury product to something for, you know, wider part of the population. And then this idea to have one fancy electric for the lady of the house and a smelly petrol-driven car for the man that didn't work for most families. And then they went with the petrol choice. But I think what's interesting is that a lot of innovations that were done for the electric car and for

women were then integrated into the petrol-driven car. So electric cars were the first ones to, you know, that you could start from the driver's seat without having to crank the the motor going, which was, as you mentioned, very dangerous. So, and that was something that was then, you know, we had the electric starter that was integrated into petrol-driven technology and was first seen as this feminine thing that no man really needed, but eventually that became part of it. Roofs, electric cars were the first ones to be made with roofs because men were not allowed to kind of demand or want cover from the rain because that again was unmanned.

but electric cars, because they were for women and product developed with women in mind, they had the first roofs. So there's also this real kind of innovation done with women in mind is then integrated into a product that we think of as male. And it's an interesting, interesting process, I think. I mean, it just seems fascinating, just even trying to imagine being in the room where they're making it, having a discussion about putting a roof on the car. I mean, surely there must have been someone who at least wanted to say,

this sounds like a logical thing. But I guess what you're saying is from the observation of it, again, it was something that very quickly was associated with the feminine. Yeah, and it took a long time for petrol-driven cars to actually have roofs as standard. I think that we're talking in 1920, which doesn't quite make sense. And I think, but I think you're touching on something very interesting because I think today, in the era we live in today, the form of capitalism we live in, we think of technology as this really rational, neutral force

that is pushing everything else in front of itself. And all we can do is adapt as societies, as humans, to whatever these geniuses in Silicon Valley invent. And then if that require us to change everything about our labor markets, our lives, or that's just what we have to do because the forces of technology are so powerful and rational and brilliant. But if you look at, for example, what I do in the book, Mother Invention is, you know, just look at how gender bias, for example, affects innovation. It just immediately shows you that this whole narrative of technology as this neutral, brilliant, rational force is not true.

It's sort of, you know, we make the machines and we buy the machines and we create the machines and we build them and we come into all of these things shaped by all of the things that shapes us. And one of them, which I focus on, is gender bias. So I think, I mean, that's what I wanted with the book. It's obviously show all of these examples of gender bias holding innovation back, but also fundamentally make people think about technology in a different way. And I mean, it must be that some of it is due to chance as well,

like a conversation that did happen or didn't happen. or patents that, you know, never got through. There must be all of these little quirks. And I found that I found some of the examples really fascinating. I mean, the big argument that really struck me that you were making on the, well, just in the, which encapsulated the relationship, I guess, between technology and gender bias was this, this idea that there are different aspects to, you know, technology in the widest sense.

And maybe we should define that in a second. but in the sense that there's all of these different sort of aspects of of human innovation and creativity and when society which is you know dominated by patriarchy decides that one is it doesn't like one or it's threatened by i think threatened is a word that you that you use then it sidelines it marginalizes it and calls it feminine and i thought that was a really interesting way of looking at it when in fact a lot of these things that society has deemed as feminine are in fact just part of human that are human needs and I thought there was an interesting point yeah I mean I think on a really deep level the way I see it sort of that is what what patriarchy fundamentally does it sort of takes the human experience and divides it into you know genders it in certain ways and says you know what we think of us as male particularly at this moment of time is is superior to what we think of as feminine in this moment of time. And it denies both men and women in all genders, you know, the full

extent of what it means to be human. So that's on a kind of existential level. I think that's what it does to all genders, really, the system. But obviously, if you think of just something as innovation, because it does these things that, oh, that's feminine, so therefore it's not technology, because it can't be, really limits our potential to, to, to, to, and so it's innovate and solve problems in things that, in ways that are very, very damaging, I think. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's fascinating. Okay, let's move on to maybe talking about what has been historically viewed as a technology and what hasn't.

And one of the things that you bring up is talking about sewing and soft and hard materials and this milk but not cement. Maybe you can talk a little bit about those distinctions and how they fit into catalytic. degrees. Yes. So I guess that's a big argument of the book is that, you know, we look back at the history of innovation and it looks as if everything important ever was invented by men, by white men. And that's obviously not true. And the explanation that I give to the exclusion of women from that narrative is that whenever women innovate or create technologies, in spite of all the barriers set up, you know, formal barriers for women to do this, everything.

thing from, you know, not access to the type of education, to, you know, patents, to finance, all of these things. But even when women invent and create technologies, which women have always done, we think of these as not being technology. So we talk about the bronze age, the Iron Age, the Stone Age. And as some historians have pointed out, you know, why don't we talk about the ceramic age, for example? Of course, ceramic is technology. It's very, very important technology a lot of that was developed by women for thousands of years same with with cloth weaving all of that very very important technology for a society women because of the economic role that women had historically were developing a lot of that

that doesn't get to define a whole era you know why do we talk about the stone age and not the string age you know string is an invention from that period that they think was was invented by women, you could argue that string is as important as a club made from stone. You know, if you have rope or string, you can tie things together, you can make fishing nets and so on. But almost all the time when women invent something, even women invented software. When my mother went into programming, that wasn't considered to be technical. It wasn't considered to be tech. And therefore, women were allowed in. And then it shifted. And we started to see it as technology, it became the status increase, the pay increase.

The women were pushed out. And that story happens again and again and again. That whatever women do, it's not allowed to be seen as technology. So what's the, if we can just pick up on that point. So what's the causality here? Is it because we've got two, we've got, there's kind of two scenarios. There's a scenario where women invent things and they don't, they might be acknowledged or not acknowledged, but it doesn't fit into the greater narrative, like there never is an age

associated with it. Okay, so that's one thing. But there's the other thing where it's by the by, whether a man or a woman invents or, you know, whether it's both of them inventing or this certain technology. But the economics here is really interesting of how some things then, is it because they start to become profitable under capitalism? and where do you have any insights into whether that same trend and causality took place in a kind of pre-capitalist era, perhaps?

That would be really interesting. Yeah, well, to be perfectly honest, this is something that I am sort of, it's a part of the book, and I look particularly at programmers in Mother Invention, but these really important and tricky questions they're asking me right now is actually something I'm trying to explore right now for my next book because I am very curious about it myself and it's not very studied. So I'm not sure I know yet what I think about this. But, and I think, I mean, so I look at programmers specifically what happened and how sort of

status follows masculinity in the economy. I mean, we have that in a lot of professions. Women now have gone into biology as a field and what happens to pay in biology or for biologists that goes down. So it happens a lot, this mechanism. it's not very studied. And I think a lot of people, you know, when we see these figures, we think, you know, exactly what you're asking? What is the koshal, you know, what happens first? How does this mechanism actually work? And I'm not sure I can answer it yet. Maybe I can

in a few years time. But I think when it comes to programmers, I mean, I look at that in mother invention. And it seems to be quite complex. In some countries like in the UK, it was a real, almost a conscious, it was a conscious project from the public sector from the state when they realized that these new machines were becoming very important for society. They looked at the people that knew things about programming or were doing programming and they were women of the wrong social class. And the British state actually had an official program to get more men of the right social background interested in computing so that these men could then go on and become head of

computing at the Bank of England. And they, you know, they invested, invested taxpayers' money into this program. So that's a very sort of open, you know, we have the wrong people here. You know, we see that this is becoming more important. We need the right, we need men of the right social class to be involved in this profitable process now. Yeah. But that wasn't the case in all countries. I mean, somewhere more subtle. I mean, in the US, you know, you often talk about you had a lot of female and also a lot of women of color, you know, in quite well-paid jobs. And I guess what we today would call sort of, you know, software developing developers and so on.

And then it shifts. And a lot of people point to that suddenly they started recruiting using personality tests. So before that, you would just look. looking at what people could do. But then when you start recruiting using a personality test where the assumptions, you suddenly have assumptions about what kind of person will be successful at this job. And those assumptions are often based on studies on men. And what happened was that suddenly women were not getting these positions anymore. So I do think it is quite complex how this works. And it's not the same in every country. And there are countries in the world where you

still have many more women still in computing. So it's, I think we need to look at this more. And I, I try to give some explanations, particularly for, for, for what happened to computer programming. And, and also because we've forgotten about it. I think we, we treat it as if women were never in tech while women actually invented software. And today, obviously, about that. Yeah, let's take a step back and talk about that. Because I thought, you're going into this subject and I really want to explore it which is I think the big big hitter in the book which is well one reading this bit which you actually write very dramatically and I was I was reading it like you know it was some exciting narrative story about girl years and kilo girls

and the measurement of of computer power yeah computer power in girl years yeah kilo girls not Keelebytes. Let's start from the beginning on that bit because I think it's fascinating going all the way forward to the story about the guy in Google who said women are bad at coding. So maybe tell us a bit about that story because I think you tell it really well in the book. Yeah. No, I mean, it was so the first computers were people, right, who were doing computing, doing calculations. And this became a profession that was not very high status. So you had a lot of people of colour and you had a lot of women. So sorry to interrupt you again. Can we build the picture? So these are women sitting in rooms doing, they're doing

calculations over and over again. That's what they're doing basically. In rows, on desks, sitting, calculating stuff. Calculating or categorizing or, you know, these sort of things. So they were human computers, and then during the Second World War, electronic computers were developed. So they were supposed to replace the girls who were literally in the basement doing these calculations.

And now you had a machine in the other basement being able to do these calculations. So in order to measure the productivity of these new machines, the measurement, the first measurement used of computer power was how many, if you're a company or an institution, if you're going to buy this big new electronic machine, how many girls will that replace? How much girl power can be replaced by this computer power? And that is literally how they were talking about it, which is absolutely fascinating. It is because the point that you make is that, and you give this great

example about the guy who was fired from Google because of this email that was caught going around saying the thing that we know a lot of people think which is let's face it women are bad at coding yeah but in this specific example it was it's not just that you know it's not true and that's a sexist thing to say it's that society had actually deemed this feminine work so it was it was almost sexist in the other way around it wasn't expected this is something that men could do but I guess my question there was Is it because the quality of the work, and like we said, these are girls sitting in basements doing calculations, you know, some sort, I guess a, was it a glorified or even less glorified secretarial work? Yeah, yes, less. It was something that was deemed, you know, it was a job you could, you could easily, quite easily get. I mean, some of them were doing incredibly complicated things.

But they were sitting down, there was no action, there was no banter. So presumably that's why they thought men couldn't do it. I'm trying to figure out what's the thing. No, the men often didn't want the work. I mean, you had certainly had a lot of, in the US you had a lot of men of color doing these things. But it was deemed a suitable job for women. All these ideas about women being meticulous, right, and good at following instructions. And that's sort of even when women started, you know, programming real electronic computers, we still had that.

oh are you good at cooking from a recipe you will probably be a good programmer which is something that actually makes sense in a way because it is in a way the social you mean in terms of like the socialised sense that you know women are controlled women can control themselves that sort of

yeah and women cook food from recipes and that is you know a recipe is a form of code right and you follow it and meticulously and you end up with a great stew, right? It's a bit similar, actually, to coding. I can see why they were comparing these things, but it's obviously interesting that they took something that was female coded, like cooking and compared it to coding, and how we now, you know, we think of it as, you know, in a very different way. Yeah, so I guess it's several factors that we're talking

about at the same time. One is thinking, you know, there's some kind of invention that is being developed in society and somebody somewhere or a group of people are thinking either consciously or not consciously, is this women's work or is this men's work, you know, based on, you know, the gender roles at the time. But of course, then there are other factors, which is not this perceived innate sense of what is female and what is male, which, you know, of course, we'd argue with through a feminist lens, but also what pays well, what doesn't pay well, and where does this fit in terms of the economic development and when something, and I think one of the things that you talk about is that this all changes when it becomes with Silicon Valley

and you've got this story about why Silicon Valley is not in Buckinghamshire. Do you want to tell us about about that? No, but that, I mean, so the first computer was in the, was in Buckinghamshire programmed by, by women. And there were a lot of women. So Britain really, you know, you couldn't make the case that Britain should have had developed something like Silicon Valley or at least been further ahead with tech in computing than what ended up happening. And women were building computers in Britain to, I mean, even to the extent that in parts of the industry or, I mean, it was public sector, when they had equal pay legislation, it was argued that it shouldn't apply to many parts of computing because there were actually no

men there, right? So, and what I talk about in the book is how things like Britain then deciding that these chain smoking working class women who were doing coding could not be trusted to become head of computing at the Bank of England or go on. I mean, they were pushed out of the industry. And who made the tea for these women? Just going back to the Adam Smith and who cooks his dinner, just as a small tangent.

Who made the women's tea and brought them cake and bought the cigarettes? Yeah, I think they did it themselves. I mean, I don't know, but I guess this was not high status work. It was just something that needed to be done. And then when it became high status work, you didn't take the people that already knew stuff about it. You had to bring in guys from, you know, Oxbridge to, of the right social class and get them interested in computing.

And I guess what I talk about in the book is, you know, how did this, I mean, it was a waste, wasn't it? And all these, you had entrepreneurs like, I mean, I interviewed for the book, I mean, Dame Steve Chirley, for example, who set up, she saw this in the 60s, how all these women who were really good at doing software were pushed out of the industry for lots of reasons and she set up a company just hiring female programmers

and she made a lot of money on that. So she saw that opportunity but obviously because of sexism other people didn't. So did this sort of contribute to Britain, you know, not being further ahead

when it came to the sectors of the economy? I think it's worth discussing, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I want to imagine that Buckingham show would be in a very different place if it had Silicon Valley. It would, yeah, it would, yeah. Maybe one example, one other last, one of the last big examples I want to talk about is the relationship between bra technology and putting people on the moon, which all happened before the suitcases had wheels.

So maybe tell us a little bit about that and how it was the technology for women's clothing that effectively could make the space suits work and not make the metal, which of course was, I think you're saying where the, the men, male designers went with those kind of hard fabrics. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was a big problem or just solution, you know, you needed a solution to this problem. You know, we're going to space. What are we going to wear? A human body is not very, well, it's not at all, well adapted to survive in space. And astronauts also need to move around. And it's a complicated thing to solve. And there were a lot of companies who wanted this big contract with NASA, creating the spacesuits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were going to wear on the moon.

And just as you say, a lot of the thinking was sort of traditional engineering thinking, okay, we're going to put the human body in a place that's very dangerous for the human body, which means we need to put it in sort of some kind of hard armour. Which, of course, is what was done for centuries when you're in charge of, you know, a war operation or whatever. You put the hardest possible materials. So in a sense, it kind of made sense to a certain historical trajectory. Maybe, or maybe not, carry on, sorry.

No, but then innovation is, you know, when somebody has a different perspective and brings in a solution often from a different world, right? And this is what happened here, because you had this company who was specialised in female underwear production, which meant they had this consumer brand of female underwear called Playtex, which was at the time in the US, you know, synonymous with a certain type of female shapera, I guess we would say today, in the same way that a brand that spanks or skims would be today. But they also had a military division because during the Second World War, when they were cut off from rubber supply, and a lot of these sort of shapera of the time were made from rubber,

they in order to survive they had to to work for the US military and they kept this military division they had been you know doing things for the Air Force and they had a different idea they wanted this contract too and they wanted to make the moon suits from soft materials and their suit their prototype was hand-sown by female seamstresses literally moved from braw production to space suit production. And this suit was the only one that passed the tests that NASA put up for. And reluctantly after, I mean, it's kind of a long story, but reluctantly NASA gives this contract to this company. And these suits, you know, these famous suits, I mean, we all know what they look like, these sort of white sort of soft things that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

ended up wearing. They were made by these female seamstresses. And my point in the book is that, of course, was technology. This was a, and this was quite an, a very innovative company where, I mean, the engineers were male, the seamstresses were female, but the male engineers, they had to take sewing lessons for months in order to understand the technical processes. And there was this real exchange of ideas and skills, which ended up making this invention successful and took us to the moon. And I think it's fascinating how we don't think of sewing or brass as technology. And I think one of the fascinating things that you talk about there in that exchange between like the technicians and the seamstresses is is the very kind of specific knowledge around how

you do stitching and where, you know, there would be give and where there wouldn't be and where you'd get stretched and how you can minimize the amount of air going in. all these things that, of course, when you think about space travel, it makes complete sense. And I've got this image in my head of those conversations of, you know, the technicians are going, oh, yeah, wow, okay, we've not thought about that. But of course, people making things like bras and corsets and, you know, those would be thinking about that sort of stuff. So that's a lovely kind of crossover story, isn't it, between, and there must be more of that, about how stuff like post-World War, where there are a lot of women working in certain,

in certain, you know, technological areas where they didn't before. Yes, it must have been. I mean, I love this story too. And I also, I mean, the bit the bit I like the most, I think, which is the funniest about that particular story is how the seamstresses, they had all the skills, the technical skills. And then NASA wanted technical drawings because that was the language that they understood. And the seamstresses didn't have time to produce any technical drawings and didn't see the point of them because they were not, that's not how they were thinking. That's not how they were taught. which freaked NASA out. And then in the end, this company, they had to hire a separate team of male engineers whose only job was to translate what the seamst process had already done to technical drawings that were never used

in the production process. But it made them feel calmer. It was within their framework. That's fascinating. Yeah. So it's, and you're right. I haven't thought of it that way. There must be more things like this.

That collaboration between kind of two worlds of thinking. But I think what you've just said there is, is really the point, the fact that if you are creating an item in 3D that has to be pliable, unless you had a three, I mean, maybe if they had a 3D printer, that would be the solution. That's how you would draw the maquette, so to speak. But if they expected it to be a 2D drawing, that, that again must have been a fascinating conversation where somebody's pulling their hair out, we can't do this without the drawing. And the seamstress is going,

yeah, but you just need to do it. Like, I'll show you. And no, no, no, we need to put it on a piece of paper. That's great. I love that idea. Let's move on to something that we're really interested on, on ACFM. We might do an entire show on,

which is automation and what you can and should automate and what you shouldn't. And it's a topic that we think about a lot. And one argument that you make, which I really love is talking about the things that you can automate and the things that you can't. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about automate and why you can't automate cleaning. Well, I mean, I wouldn't say can't. I mean, who knows, right? You know, God invented economists to make astrologists seem credible. I mean, who knows what's going to

happen in the future? It seems harder, right, to automate something, or it is harder. to automate something like cleaning a house. And there was this real assumption that, I guess what I talk about in the book is assumptions about that if we could crack something like chess, you know, if we can create a computer that can beat Gary Kasparov at chess, then we will have created a type of intelligence or something that can solve almost all other problems as well.

And that obviously ended up not happening because computers beat humans at the best humans at chess a very long time ago and we still don't have cleaning robots that really work very well. And what I talk about in the book is that there is this, there are a lot of assumptions around what's in, intelligence. There are a lot of assumptions about skills on the labor market and what's a tricky problem. Obviously, we thought, oh, you know, making something, creating a machine that can do chess or complicated calculations is obviously harder than creating a machine that can wait at a

restaurant or clean a house, because that's how we think of status, right, on the labor market. And the people developing a lot of this technology and thinking, about it within the universities were, you know, white men who thought of intelligence as, oh, you're intelligence if you can solve complicated mathematical problems and are good a chess. But that's not, you know, that type of intelligence is great, but there's a lot of other types of intelligence that is needed to have an economy at work. And, you know, we're stuck now in a, in a situation where certain things are much easier to automate. and other things much, much harder.

And we might crack those problems in the future. But since this is the case, you know, then what consequences will they have on the labour market? You know, can you see a world where we're cleaning becomes high status? I love that point. I absolutely loved it. I mean, the thing that struck me when I read that bit was when you're cleaning a house, you're effectively you're cleaning after people and people as you point out in the book are unpredictable so people will do things like knock over a glass of water and if you knock over a glass of water

unless you've never cleaned up a spill before after anyone which maybe a lot of inventors have but definitely most women or most people who live in a house you know many men as well. If you're, if that, that action of trying to automate, that's when I really understood it when you brought that up in the book. If you try to automate the action of cleaning up a spilt cup of tea, it automatically makes me understand why that's way more difficult to do than beat an expert at chess. It is, it is because it's, you know, you're not, you have the tea and it's it's spilled over certain furniture and you need to sort of rub it with different things depending on what material it's spilled over and you have to know how hard you're going to

rub in order to get the tea out but not ruin the material and all of those things just like and we take that for granted we have a lot of that knowledge a lot of that intelligence literally in our bodies in our hands but but to make a machine do that that is incredibly tricky. It's a huge amount of information. Like it's a huge amount of information. You have to put in about how hot the beverage was. Yeah.

Like what it's spilled on, has it spilled on a human? Is someone screaming? Is someone in danger? Is this an okay situation? What else is happening in the vicinity? Like, is the baby crying? Yeah. Is it, you know, is this falling on an electrical socket?

Like when I sat and I thought about it, I thought, That's a huge amount of information in terms of probability that you would have to put in, which would probably take even a really fast computer sometime too long. And the T's already seeped in, you know, and the baby's crying and everyone's on fire by the time the computer may. But maybe you're right. Maybe we don't know. We're just looking at it from, you know, an early 21st century perspective. And maybe that stuff is something you can automate. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting.

And also a household is a very unpredictable environment. So it's easier to create a self-cleaning house from, you know, from the get-go than create robots that can clean existing houses. So, I mean, robots and machines are very successful in environments that are built for them. And those environments are called factories. But they're much less successful so far out in sort of the unpredictable human world. And, you know, we need to, if we're going to have to. guess, which we do need to, I think, if we want to have a, you know, a good public policy response

to automation and the risks of that and be able to manage that politically in a way that doesn't end up with, you know, lots of people being left behind or huge, you know, even larger inequalities in the economy, we need to have some kind of idea of, you know, what jobs are being automated and which ones are not. And then thinking about it in terms of gender, which I do, I think, is we should do much more of that because if this is the case that robots are good at automating certain things and quite bad at automating things that have to do with unpredictable environments, relationships and other humans, which people specialize in those type of professions in almost every economy of the world, that's women. You have women in care.

You have women in, you know, cleaning, for example. You have women, even in teaching, in, you know, social work in these things where machines, so far at least, are really unlikely to replace human labor. What does that mean? Does that mean that we will have a lot of unemployed men and we have to retrain them into care? I think I have a phrase in the book, you know, maybe we've focused too much on teaching girls to code and too little on teaching boys to care because it's, you know, if this continues, you know, this is one of the areas where, you know, there were, you know, there will be increasing demand because of ageing populations and also where humans will actually have a competitive advantage against machines. So there will be need for human labor in

these fields. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I love that. And I think it really brings into perspective. What it made me think about was it seems like what the vision that some people have, you know, who are, you know, making these statements or talking about, you know, the second machine age, discourse, which we'll talk about in a second, is that it's almost like their vision of the future doesn't involve any human beings, or their vision is one where human beings are as robotic as possible, which completely ignores the fact that that is, that's not what we are. Like, sure, you can codify and automate certain aspects of human life. But, you know, as you point out in the book, like, all humans come out of another human,

being's uterus like you can't automate that yeah at least yeah maybe maybe in the future but not now yeah yeah i mean maybe in the future but even even i like science fiction sorry i sure no that's completely that's completely fine and a lot of our listeners would but but from where we're standing now if we're talking about the human body as it exists now like human bodies and human brains like move in the world in a certain way so unless you're explicitly saying that, and I feel like, I guess what I'm saying is it's not explicitly said by people who make the full automation argument. It's not explicitly said that a future with human beings who are in fact not human as we understand it now is where that vision of technology sits. Because otherwise, you know, we're still going to spill things and, you know, get hurt and and need to hug people.

You know what I mean? That sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I know. And I think I say this in the book, but actually, if you look at it, it's sort of, we've been much less successful creating robots that can do what humans can do than we think. And what we've instead tried to do a lot, and we call it tech and innovation, is we've created models where we treat human workers as if they were machines. You know, you look at, you know, how Amazon workers, workers, are expected to move around or I talk about care work in many economies

where care workers' jobs are managed through mobile phone apps and divided into almost as if these care workers were robots and they have to do this and this and this and this on certain times. So we've created these business models. The whole gig economy is a lot about treating people as if they were robots.

And that we've done quite successfully. I mean, I wouldn't say it's successful because it's, you know, I think it's exploitation and very problematic. But that is, that is nothing new, sort of exploiting workers is sort of the oldest business model in the world. And we call it, you know, high tech. And it's not just because it's run through an app. Yes, which is a whole big thing, the gig economy and kind of where it's going to go next, which I think is a fascinating.

Maybe it's not your next book, but the one. book after that. Yeah. Tackle that question. Okay, so maybe let's just end on a couple of things related to what we've just been talking about, which is, I mean, we've talked about most of this, but maybe you have something else to add on why it's a problem likening humans to computers. We were just talking about this, but why is this a problem?

Yes. I mean, it is, so we've, I mean, I have a chapter on this, how we, we have this. this tendency to compare ourselves to the most advanced technology we can think of at the time. So, you know, the Vikings used to think of, you know, human beings as being created through axe technology. The world was created through all sorts of mystical processes, but human beings were actually cut by Odin using an axe, which was, you know, high-tech. in that period.

And then, you know, when technology moved, we started thinking of ourselves as run like clockwork, you know, this mechanical view of how humans worked, right? So we've, and that was obviously when mechanical clocks were sort of the fanciest technological marvels of the time and so on and so on. When the telephone exchange came, you know,

immediately we started thinking of the human brain, is like a telephone exchange. So we've always had these metaphors. We like using technological metaphors for ourselves. And obviously today we think of the brain as a computer. And, you know, you could say that's a useful metaphor to some extent. But it also does erase a lot of things. For example, the human body and what it means to have a body and what that means.

all the things that we were talking about. Yeah, all the things we were talking about. A lot of the things that we code as female as well and the relationship between bodies and how, you know, the work of bodies is what, you know, makes the economy and the world go around and all of these things. And it's, it hides a lot of exploitation. It's, it's just not a very useful. I think it's quite a problematic way of seeing ourselves.

And I think it's useful to know that we've always, almost always done that. We like to use technological metaphors for what it is to be a human being. And it doesn't make it accurate. So, Catherine, you might want to give a final word on something else, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about to end the contrasting visions of a good life, which you end the book on. You talk about wizards and prophets. You said that you were into sci-fi and futuristic stuff.

Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yes. I mean, so the book ends with climate change and the climate emergency and innovation and how that is, you know, in my view, and loads of people's view, the big challenge in front of us. And I talk about this distinction that is not mine at all, but it comes from a American science journalist called Charles Mann, who talks about how almost all conversations around innovation and the environment for decades,

I mean, not just the climate change debate, but almost everything in that field ends up becoming this not very productive duel between what he calls wizards and profits. So those are two archetypes, I guess, with different views on innovation. So you have, so the wizards, that would be somebody like Elon Musk or, I guess, Boris Johnson, for example. You know, people who are very, they see innovation and technology as the solution to, for example, climate change. Nature has always been out to kill us historically. And we've always managed to invent some form of technology to prevent that.

Ressel it to the ground. Wrestling it to the ground. You know, come up with something big, right? Innovation is the solution. So that's what they believe. And then on the other end, you have the profits who take the complete opposite view, right? So, you know, if technology and innovation is what, that is how we are wrecking the planet. So how can more technology and innovation be the solution to climate change if that's what's causing climate change?

It doesn't make sense the solution is behavioral change. We need to live differently. smaller, you know, not consume less, degrowth, you know, all of these things, right? So, and I guess most people recognize this debate, you know, the wizard and the profit shouting at each other, one saying, you know, innovation and technology, the other one's saying behavioral change or live differently. And it just doesn't really take us forward because I think most people realize that it's probably is always a bit of both.

I mean, to bring it back, like, examples I have in my book, like the rolling suitcase, you know, why was that the innovation of it, or was it behavioral change that people suddenly started traveling differently or that, you know, our concept of masculinity change, like, what really enabled that changed? It's almost always a little bit of both when it comes to sustainability. Oh, people actually start eating less meat because they know that, that, you know, that is good for those CO2 footprint, and then suddenly you have demand for new products, new type of food products, and you might have some kind of innovation there.

So these things always sort of almost always work in tandem in all sorts of complex ways, and the wizard shouting at the profit doesn't really take us forward. So in the end of the book, I introduced a different archetype, which, you know, it's the witch. And I talk about because the whole book is about how things we code us feminine are taken less seriously and are seen as inferior and probably the biggest thing that we've coded as feminine is nature right and there's this view that technology is this masculine force that has to control and wrestle nature to the ground in a way and both the prophet and the wizard they are stuck in this way of looking at the world I argue because they see

technology as something different than nature and these two things as two separate things. And so I introduced the witch who is different from the wizard. You know, she doesn't do her magic from a big tower. She's down in nature, in the forest, getting her magical powers, her innovation and her technology through that kind of communion with nature and ritual. And that is, I think, an interesting way of trying to move beyond the wizard and the prophet by sort of saying, you know, it's not either all, but we really do need a different relationship between technology and nature.

So it's not more technology, as the wizard is saying, or less technology like the prophet is saying, but it's a different way of thinking about it. And I think writing women back into the story of innovation. and technology is a very useful way to start that project. And on that fantastic final point, thank you so much, Catherine, for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you.