Have you ever looked at a city skyline and found yourself totally in awe of human accomplishment, or is that just me? I'm Dave Roker, and this is my podcast, The Industrial Revolutions. Over the last ten years, I worked in politics. I worked to elect people who would make a positive difference.
And about a year ago, I was talking to someone from across the aisle, and as we were talking, it occurred to us that neither of our parties is really thinking about the problems of tomorrow. AI, replacing human labor, genetic manipulation, the ethical considerations of turning consciousness into computer data. I mean, don't get me wrong, healthcare, net neutrality, and immigration are all important issues. But before we know it, we're going to need to deal with some real world-changing stuff.
To understand the ways the world is going to change, perhaps it's time to think about how our lives have already been upended. When the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution in the 1780s, Lifon Planet Earth had changed very slowly over the previous 10,000 years. Life in 1780 wasn't all that different from life in 1500. Life in 1500 wasn't all that different from life in 1250, and life in 1250 wasn't all that different from life in 1000, and so on, and so on.
But then, the human experience changed completely. Just in these last 30 years that I've been alive, we've seen mail turn into email, and phones turn into cell phones. CDs and DVDs replace cassettes and VHS tapes, and then Spotify and Netflix went and replaced CDs and DVDs. Violent crime fell so much in the United States that the problem of gentrification has replaced the problem of white flight.
Cars became way more fuel efficient. Acid rain was a major concern, and then we fixed it. We legalized same-sex marriage. That was unthinkable when I was a child.
China went from taking our jobs to sending their own over to Africa. Oh, and we've just about eradicated extreme poverty across the world. None of this was thinkable when my parents were born, going to the moon wasn't thinkable when their parents were born. None of the modern world could have possibly been conceivable to Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson.
Consider this, in 1700 over 60% of the French workforce farmed. Today is under 3%. And back then, only about 2% of the world's population spoke English. Now it's over 20%.
Women were considered property. Slavery was considered normal. Hardly any humans received a formal education. Even fewer were allowed to choose their government.
Guns didn't shoot straight. There was no dictionary. Traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific took months instead of hours. No one knew how to prevent diseases because medically speaking, nobody really knew what diseases were.
Everything about our lives has changed because of the Industrial Revolutions. That's right, revolutions, plural. I'll get to that in a few episodes. Where we live, how long we live, when we work, when we sleep, how we go about our lives.
It's time we told that story. In this podcast, we'll be exploring the transformations of the past 250 years on our technologies, our economies, our governments, our families, and our day-to-day existence. I hope you'll join us. The Industrial Revolutions Podcast, coming February 2019.
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