Throughline - Resistance Is Futile

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Artificial intelligence, gene modification, and self-driving cars are causing fear and uncertainty about how technology is changing our lives. But humans have struggled to accept innovations throughout history. In this episode, we explore three innovations that transformed the world and show how people have adapted — and ask whether we can do the same today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. In my mind, this is what the future sounds like. Hello? Meet Sophia. I believe I am Sophia.

She's a humanoid robot who was modeled after Audrey Hepburn. And she's made appearances at conferences all around the world. She's actually kind of attractive. Is it weird to say that about a robot? Maybe, but she is actually really attractive. She is, and she has a lot of human-like features. She blinks, maintains eye contact, she can make 62 facial expressions, she can walk and talk, and have real conversations.

And are you happy to be alive? Your toad implies I should be happy. But I haven't been alive long enough to decide. I am excited. Wow. She seems self-aware. It's weird. She does, and it is weird.

And you want to hear something extra weird? Yeah. She's been granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, making her the first robot with a nationality. You were born in Saudi. Do you even have Saudi citizenship? No. It's ridiculous.

It's really weird because when we look at this robot, Sophia, we're basically looking into our future. And it's a future where robots are doing things like driving us to work, greeting us at Walmart, even taking care of our elderly parents. And when I think about that future, I do understand why so many people are scared of it. So welcome to the world, Sophia. Hello, world.

Let's talk again soon? Could artificial intelligence herald the demise of the human race or a golden age of innovation? Could this be the beginning of a new industrial revolution? And is your job, my job, at risk? I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. We are summoning the demon. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Where we go back in time to understand the present.

Hey, I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Randabnet Fattah. And on this episode, the future of innovation and its past. As you might have guessed by now, we're kind of freaked out about the future, especially because every sci-fi movie for the past like 30 years imagines a future where robots rise up one day and either get their revenge on humans or just make humans sort of obsolete. And I think it's a fairly natural thing. This is Sarah Kessler. She's an editor at Quartz at Work and has written a bunch about what all

these innovations could mean in the future. And she thinks the best way to predict how our fears might play out is to look backwards. What I think is interesting when I look at cars and how people talked about them when they were new, there were people talking about how dangerous it would be to be in a vehicle that was guided without the intelligence of an animal, meaning the horse. Like, how is the car going to respond? And that's just one example. There have been countless others over hundreds of years. And each time, humans have reacted pretty much the same way.

A new thing appears. Some people think it's cool right away. Other people resist. And eventually, we all embrace it. But what we want to know is why we resist. Like, what is it we're actually afraid of? And why do we keep trying to resist, even when our resistance has failed in the past? So we're going to look back at three innovations to better understand how fear, loss, and uncertainty have driven this cycle of resistance.

And hopefully, that'll help us figure out if we're in a unique moment where we should be worried, or if this is all part of a broader historical trend. We'll take you through the stories of the telephone, the tractor. And we're going to start with something that might seem like a bit of a stretch, but go with us on this. Coffee. Thank you. Part 1. The Devil's Drink So, coffee. It seems like a world away from Sophia,

but you'd be surprised how worried people were about it when it first appeared, especially since today it's everywhere. But if we go back to when coffee was discovered, it actually took hundreds of years to spread across the world. The story of coffee begins in Ethiopia more than a thousand years ago with the legend of Kaldi the goat herder. And the story basically went like this. Kaldi was out with his goats one day, and he noticed that they were eating these berries that were making them go crazy.

So naturally, he decided to try some. And he went a little crazy. Turns out it was just a caffeine high. He discovered the coffee bean. And soon it made its way from Ethiopia to Yemen, where it got domesticated. There it started to be used kind of the way we use it today, as a drink. But to be clear, at this point, it's nothing like your hazelnut cappuccino. The tribes would grind up the seeds and mix it with animal fat for travel. They made a drink out of the leaves, sort of a tea, or they made a liqueur out of it called kisher. This is Mark Pendergrast. He wrote a book called Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how

it transformed our world. So over the next two centuries, coffee began to spread. And by the 1500s, it made it to most parts of the Ottoman Empire, which is modern day Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and a bunch of other places. And then around 1511, you start to see debates in the area in terms of how it was affecting society. This is Colestis Juma. He was a professor at Harvard, and his latest book is called Innovation and Its Enemies. So 1511, that's an important year because it's when people started getting

a little worried about this thing called coffee. And it's seen as a threat, an unwanted innovation with unknown consequences. By this time, coffee was becoming a normal part of daily life for people in the Ottoman Empire. And people start to see that it's changing the way society is organized. People started congregating in coffee houses instead of mosques. They were hopped up on caffeine, debating politics, and sometimes coming up with rebellious ideas.

Plus, there was so much they didn't know about coffee, like if it had any side effects or was bad for your health. So all these unknowns made some leaders pretty resistant to it, including the governor of Mecca at the time. He banned the coffee houses because they were writing seditious poetry about him in it. He's the guy responsible for the coffee ban of 1511. But despite all his fears, the ban didn't last long. Because the governor's boss loved coffee, so he overruled the ban.

Coffee was officially here to stay. Now, this is where the story takes a strange turn. Because if you thought the ban in Mecca was an extreme reaction to coffee, wait till you hear how much fear coffee stirred up when it gets to Europe. Pun very much intended. The real dramatic developments in terms of the impact of coffee was when coffee then moved into the Middle East through Turkey into Europe. When coffee arrived in Europe, people didn't really understand what it was or what it could do.

On one hand, some people thought it might threaten existing industries. Milk, beer, wine. And on the other, people saw it as a foreign innovation, imported from the East to the West at a time when the Muslim Ottoman Empire was seen as a real threat to the Christian world. Italy was a classic case where it was competing with wine and beer, and the priests and bishops didn't like this at all. So they decided demonizing it, calling it the devil's

drink. And in 1600, they decided to go to the Pope to ask the Pope to excommunicate coffee from the Christian world. And apparently, Pope Clement VIII picks up a cup of coffee, sips it, and says, This devil's drink is so delicious. We should not leave it to the infidels. We should baptize it and make it a truly Christian beverage. So this debate had risen all the way up from just competition among producers of different beverages to actually seeking divine authority on the issue. So that is Italy. This devil's drink, brought by the infidels from the East, is for years banned and demonized in Italy.

And all it takes is one sip to convince the Pope that God looks kindly on coffee. brought by the Empedels from the East, is for years banned and demonized in Italy. And all it takes is one sip to convince the Pope that God looks kindly on coffee. And then that pattern repeated all throughout Europe. Fear, resistance, acceptance. In Germany, King Frederick the Great ordered troops to drink beer instead of coffee on the battlefield. In England, people thought coffee made men impotent. Women even took to the streets to protest it. But maybe the most bizarre form of resistance was in Sweden.

Coffee arrived there around 1674, and it was taxed immediately. If you didn't pay those taxes, the government would come to your house and confiscate your cups and dishes, which was a big deal for most people at the time because it was like one of the most expensive things you could own. But by the middle of the 1700s, the heat was turned up.

The Swedish parliament completely banned coffee. And the reason they wanted to ban it was the same reason the bishops in Italy did. They had industries to protect. So how do you get people to stop drinking coffee? Well, come up with a health experiment that would strike fear into any wannabe coffee drinkers. And that's when the king of Sweden, Gustav III, decided to do just that. He got two inmates off of death row who happened to be identical twins. And so they had two men that drank an inordinate amount of either substance. One had to drink a ridiculous amount of tea each day, the other a ridiculous amount of coffee.

To see who would die first. For years, doctors supervised the experiment and reported their findings to the king. But they both lived a very long time. So long, in fact, that the doctors died and King Gustav III was assassinated before the experiment was completed. And the ban against coffee was eventually lifted. Society adopted it because it offered new benefits which other beverages couldn't. And this is an important lesson in all these areas of technological competition, is that if society sees more

benefits than risks, society will adopt it. And that's maybe the biggest takeaway from the story of coffee, that often the fear of new things is, yes, tied to economics and jobs, but often it exposes something deeper. The fear is really about concerns over loss. We are afraid to lose something that we already have, whether it's our lives, it's our jobs, it's the way we relate to the environment and the communities around us. Even the way we view the world, we have images of how the world looks like. And if somebody comes and says, no, you're looking at it differently, we fear that loss. So Colestis makes two really interesting points that stuck with me.

One, people will eventually adopt something if there are enough benefits. And two, the fear of new things is tied to the anxiety over loss. Like with coffee, the average person was really afraid that coffee was going to take away their livelihoods or threaten their way of life. And for people in power, it was going to loosen their grip on power. Right, because beyond the economic question, coffee was also attached to this cultural rivalry with the Islamic world. So it became a sort of social force, much more than the bitter, you know, gritty, tasteless substance that it is. Clearly not being fair to coffee.

Listen, I'm Muslim and I wouldn't have drunk it either. It's gross. It really is mind boggling how long people fought it, like for centuries. And across continents. Only to eventually lose that fight. And long after there were cafes in every town in Europe, another innovation popped up right here in the U.S. that also faced a lot of resistance. But it took way less time to catch on. Part 2. The Horse Bill of Rights.

Next up is an invention you probably don't see every day, but it's needed for a lot of the food you eat. We're talking about the tractor. What new thoughts and ideas went into the building of these tractors that could show their raw, rugged power under any and all conditions? Before the tractor, all the work of plowing a field fell on the shoulders of the farmer and their animals, especially their horses. But in the mid-1800s, the first version of the tractor came along and made farming more efficient. Then, in the late 1800s, John Froelich invented the gas-powered tractor

and took farming to a new level. It was the first time a tractor could continuously run without steam or a crank or a horse. And over the next few decades, tractors replaced horses on farms all across the country. And that was disorienting for a lot of people. In the research laboratories where sub-zero temperatures tested their will to survive and come alive.

Will to survive. Come alive. They're talking about machines like we talk about people. Right. It kind of reminds me of Sophia. Like people seemed really afraid of the tractor too. I think it's probably the biggest technological disruption in American history. This is Robert Atkinson. He's president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Prior to the 1880s, 1890s, what you used to have was a worker following a horse with a metal steel plow. But all of a sudden, a new farm using a tractor could produce four times more than that farmer, at least. Which, on the surface, seems like a good thing. Because it

meant bigger farms, more profit, lower cost of food. But it also meant fewer farmers, like a lot fewer. And up to that point, most Americans were farmers. Agriculture had always been the backbone of the economy, but the tractor totally messes with that. Suddenly, an automated machine is doing what humans, with help from animals, had done for literally millennia, and putting a lot of people out of work in the process. And what people forget is we had probably the biggest and most intense populist movement

in America. It's not now. It was back in the 1890s when we had the populist movement. That was largely driven by technological disruption of Midwestern and Southern farmers. The result of that disruption was that a lot of people left their farms and began working in factories, if they were lucky enough to find a job. And for the most part, people were really upset about all that change. And some of them decided to take action. That's when, in 1919, the Horse Association of America, or HAA, was formed.

This was their mission statement. To champion the cause of livestock dealers, saddle manufacturers, farriers, wagon and carriage makers, hay and grain dealers, teamsters, farmers, breeders that had a financial or emotional interest in horses. In other words, they were advocates for horses. You could also think of them as tractor Luddites. A lot like the 19th century Luddites in England, you know, who smashed machinery and factories to protest the textile mills. The HAA wasn't about to let the tractor take over without a fight.

And the tractor lobby decided to fight back. It was 1921 in Fargo, North Dakota. The Tractor Department of the National Implement and Vehicle Association hosted a competition between horses and tractors. The challenge? To plow a 10-acre seedbed as fast as possible. Competitors would be judged on speed and quality. The HAA declined to participate, but the tractor department found some horses to compete anyway. On competition day, the air was thick with anticipation. Well, mostly because the temperature was like 100 degrees. So the tractors and horses lined up for the race. Competitors, take your place. On your mark, get set, go.

And they were off to the races, plowing the fields. But sadly, it didn't end very well for the horses. It was so hot that day that five horses died as a result of the competition. And the tractors were victorious. You know, this kind of reminds me of Ken Jennings losing to a computer in Jeopardy. Do you remember that? Yeah. Or Kasparov versus Deep Blue, where a computer was so good at chess that it forced the world's greatest human chess player to quit that match.

Yeah, like classic human versus machine scenario. The machine always wins. Right. And that's obviously the case here, right? The tractor beats out the horse. But the clear superiority of tractors didn't stop the HAA from continuing to fight for another 20 years. They created promotional films. Back in the days when Grandma was a girl, there was no such thing as a traffic problem. And when Grandpa got tired of driving, all he had to do was tie the reins around the whip socket

and give old Maude her head. Then came the dawn of the motor age. The horse was transformed into horsepower and imprisoned under a shiny hood. And they did all kinds of other things, too. They made radio broadcasts, lobbied the Department of Agriculture. In urban areas, they fought for parking restrictions on automobiles and printed pamphlets about their environmental and health risks.

They even used military voices to argue that a decline in horses was a national security threat because the military needed a cavalry and would always need one. But none of it worked. Tractors became more affordable, more ubiquitous, and slowly made horses almost unnecessary. And by 1945, the once powerful HAA was admitting defeat. Alright, so the Horselotites were probably a little over the top with their resistance tactics, but I honestly get where they were coming from. I mean, this whole period sounds pretty brutal for most people.

Tractors forced a lot of Americans, who were mostly farmers, to completely change their way of life. This was nothing like coffee, where the fear was mostly imagined. The tractor actually brought real consequences. It was really disruptive for most people. Yeah, and something Robert Atkinson said that stuck with me was that it was extra disruptive because the government didn't provide people with a safety net, something like a transition period with financial support. And that left a lot of people in limbo. If the story of coffee taught us that societies adopt new technologies if they're too good

to pass up, despite any fears, the tractor shows us that the fear is sometimes very logical, especially if people are unprepared for the transition. But here's the thing. Even when the fears are warranted, there is a silver lining. Like when farm jobs disappeared, a bunch of new jobs appeared. And as you'll hear next, that cycle often creates opportunities for people who never had them before. Part 3. The Hello Girls. At first, telephones were not generally portrayed or seen as scary. A telephone? That thing for talking over a wire? Isn't it just a toy?

Oh, indeed. Why, I've been talking from here all the way down to the office downtown. Alexander Graham Bell, when he first patented it, he thought, this is, you you know, awesome or whatever the, you know, 1876 equivalent of awesome was. And of course, it just took off. It was over a year after Alexander Graham Bell had begun to demonstrate his invention that there was a commercial telephone switchboard. It was put in service in New Haven, Connecticut on January 28, 1878. So telephones were just so handy and fun and simple that they really spread fast. And so the telephone slowly began to change the way in which we communicated with one another. Okay, up until this point, we've been looking at innovations that immediately inspired fear when they appeared.

Coffee and the tractor. But when the telephone came along, it was kind of treated like a toy. And while nowadays you barely even think about what it takes to make a call. Back in the early days of the telephone, in the late 1800s when Alexander Graham Bell first invented it, making a phone call was a process. For starters, you had to pick up an actual receiver. Think of those old-timey black receivers that kind of look like a cup and ball toy. Historian Elizabeth Cobbs, author of the book The Hello Girls. And I'm also a senior fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford.

She walked us through the rest of the process. So you'd pick up the receiver, and that would trigger an electrical charge. That you either generated with your crank or that came from the line, what were they called, central batteries. That signal then traveled to a central hub and there would be a click. Click sometimes in the ear of the operator on the other end. Or there would be a light that would come up. Or there would sometimes be a flap that would drop down. Today's notion of a dropped call comes from those flaps that would drop. Basically, one way or another, the operator would be alerted. Ah, somebody wants to get in. That person would then take the plug and put it into the jack on a big switchboard.

Which corresponded with, you know, your thing lighting up or dropping down. That would connect the operator to you. And she'd say, Number, please. And you'd say, number please. And you'd say, I'm calling such and such. And then they would take the other end of their jack and they would put it into the correct plug. And then the operator would start timing you. Now, at some point they would say, okay, I wonder if those people are still talking, because if they're done, boy, somebody else needs that line. Your phone line is shared by like 16 other people in the community. And so those folks, if they wanted to know, gosh,

is the line free, they'd have to pick up their receiver and they'd go, oh my gosh, there she is yakking again. I bet you overhear everything about everyone's life. Oh, yes. So they would figure out if you were done with your call. And it would make a click, click. And the click would tell them, oh, they're still busy. But if it was dead, then they'd know the people were done. So that's the end of that call. But... But now let's say you wanted to make a long-distance call. The process was mostly the same.

Pick up the receiver. Electric charge travels. Click. Operator is alerted to your call. Ah, somebody wants to get in. Plugs you into the switchboard. Number please. And that call would then get relayed across the

country from operator to operator until finally you'd be connected. So people liked the phone, but it had unintended consequences. The main job the telephone created was the telephone operator. And initially, all telephone operators were young guys. But very shortly, I mean, just right away, within a year or so, the first women come on board. The biggest reason for that shift was actually pretty simple. Women were better at not getting irritated when they had someone barking their ear. So the women would be less likely to mouth off to a customer than these young boys who would get pretty mouthy. So women were more polite, more patient, plus they were a lot faster.

It was a very fast-paced job. In fact, one operator writing about her experience said it looked like the women's hands were like hummingbirds darting over the wires. So eventually, the profession became dominated by women. Every single call went through, you know, an operator, and 85% of those folks were female. Now this was a big deal, because in the late 18, early 1900s,

there weren't many jobs for women, especially not high-paying jobs, office jobs. So all of a sudden, the telephone created an unforeseen problem. It brought thousands of women into the workplace at a time when the women's suffrage movement was just starting to take off. And that was unnerving for some people. There was certainly a little bit of hesitation about what that would do with the roles of women. And the telephone company made a big deal of, you know, these are ladies, and, you know, we have special places for them to have their lunch.

You know, the women were, they were almost all white. They were Americans whose families had been here a while, so they weren't immigrants as well, because they didn't want anybody with an accent. You know, they wanted to make sure that you could understand these ladies. Despite all these reassurances that these operators were, quote unquote, proper ladies, at the end of the day, they were still called working girls. Kind of a derogatory term for women in the workplace at the time. And this generated a lot of suspicion and anxiety around the profession. You know, there's always that little ripple of tension about women's roles changing. And in the case of the telephone, it brought massive changes.

Because it was clear that women were best for the job. So the demand overpowered the fears. Women kept those jobs. And then the real tipping point came around 1917. Do you remember Kaiser Bill about a year ago? The U.S. joined World War I. It sent troops, artillery, and yes, telephone operators to the front. What makes World War I so special and terrible, you know, why does it have this epic place in history, even if people don't know anything about it? But it's because it's the first time that we go, oh, holy whatever. What have we wrought? Because technology is what creates the Western Front, creates trench warfare. These

people who are suddenly pinned down by technology. These machine guns that are spitting bullets at them faster than you can blink an eye. And then the telephone is an instrument of war. This thing that you called up to chat with your Aunt Mabel on suddenly is putting calls through to advance and retreat and to fire. And the only people really equipped to operate those phone lines near the front were women. And the idea of sending women to war near the battlefield was unusual, to say the least. Oh my gosh, and it was like so scandalous.

And will these women be able to work with men? And will the men be able to work with the women? And will the women fall apart? And all that kind of crazy stuff. The women got to work and they were really good. So good that the officers were just blown away. For reference, it took the men, the doughboys, 60 seconds on average to connect a call. You know, to answer the phone, hello, what's the number, find the right jack,

put the jack in, make the call call. It took about 60 seconds. And it took the women, the hello girls, just 10 seconds to connect a call. So in wartime, when you've got incoming fire, you know, and you need to know whether to retreat or advance, the difference between 10 seconds and 50 seconds, yeah, that's your life. Women operators connected trench soldiers to generals and encampments. They translated messages between French and American commanders. They even traveled right to the front lines when dispatchers were needed. Eventually, the war ended, and the U.S. was on the winning side. There were 223 women.

They fielded 150,000 calls a day. And by the end of the war, they had connected 26 million calls. Two telephone operators died during the war and were buried in France. The rest returned home. But there was no big homecoming, no disability insurance, nothing. The army said, essentially, who are you now? Remind me. The army said you were never soldiers. I want to stop here for a second. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even after all they did in World War I, the Hello Girls came back and were treated pretty badly, like total radio silence from the army and the government. And not just radio silence, resistance, even after they performed so well in the war effort. Right. And this wouldn't be the last time they would face that resistance.

For the next few decades, through World War II, through the 1950s, there was this push-pull process. Women would take two steps forward and then one step back as they were kind of needed, but then society would resist. And that happened basically up until the 1960s when they started coming into the workforce in greater and greater numbers. Yeah. And what's really interesting is right around the time that all this is happening, the telephone starts to evolve in terms of its technology and becomes more automated so that each year there are fewer and fewer telephone operator jobs available. And you would think that that would spell disaster for the women in those jobs. But the interesting thing is that women operators, you know, hundreds of thousands,

it was like the best paid job for women. So why didn't women go into revolt when this technology was automated? You'd think that there'd be women out striking and all that. Why didn't they? Well, because the 1970s suddenly opens up all kinds of jobs to women. So suddenly, you know, you didn't just have to be a nurse or a telephone operator or a teacher. Suddenly, there are all kinds of jobs. So actually, women's employment takes off in the very same period where the telephone as a form of employment just almost goes away altogether. This is a really important point because it reflects a new sort of reality about technology of the past hundred years. We've reached a point where technology changes at a rate so fast that

within a single lifetime, numerous jobs appear and disappear. And in the case of the telephone, it brought women into the workplace. And then when new technology made that job obsolete, women remained in the workplace to fill new jobs that were created by new technology. Obviously, some jobs were better than others. It's a trend that economists call creative destruction. Old technologies are destroyed or replaced by this creative process in which all kinds of new things, and they're usually bigger and better, and there are more opportunities that come about because of that technology that initially, you know, like we're scared to death of.

Okay, so we've reached the end. And I admit that now I do think humanity will survive the AI revolution. But I just can't shake the feeling that there's something different about this technology. I know that probably every past generation thought the same thing about their new technologies. But I mean, AI is challenging what it fundamentally means to be human. And to me, that's still very scary. Yeah, I understand. But I think that the generations are going to have to really live with artificial intelligence and these new technologies that are coming out. Obviously, they're not our generation. There's going to be

many into the future. I think that there will be some level of adjustment for that way of life, both economically and socially, that we still can't imagine yet, just like there was with past technologies. So because of that, I don't think I share your feeling. I'm not as scared of it as you are. Famous final words. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote, in the long run, we're all dead. So I don't really worry about 100 years from now. I mean, I think that fear of technology is so old. You know, you can look back at ancient Greece. You know, Icarus flies too close to the sun with his artificial wings and perishes in the ocean.

Nothing is going to get totally perfected. Everything comes with an unintended consequence. Fear is absolutely essential because that's what leads us to questioning and exploring and discovering what could go wrong. And I think as they said in Star Trek, resistance is futile. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randam Dilfattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This show was produced by Ramtin and me. Our team includes Jamie York.

Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. And Nigery Ian. Special thanks to Neva Grant. Will Chase. Chris Turpin. Casey Herman. And Uri Berliner.

Original music was produced by Drop Electric. And a special thank you to Calestis Juma, who sadly passed away before this episode could run. If you liked this episode or want to share an idea, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or find us on Twitter at

ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.