APPROACHNG THE SECOND MACHINE AGE

Article by:  Asst.Prof. Suwan Juntiwasarakij, Ph.D., MEGA Tech Senior Editor

Over two hundred years, industrial revolutions arrived to bend the curve of human history almost ninety degrees. Historians of technology often mention three industrial revolutions: the introduction of steam, electricity, and information technology (IT). The distinction between the first and second machine age is also important in the debate about technology and work.

THE FIRST MACHINE AGE IS MECHANICAL

The first machine age covers the first and the second industrial revolution. That age involved machines that provide muscle power. The third industrial revolution is the second machine age, in which machines also supply thinking power. In thinking about the relationship between technology and employment, we should therefore consider the technical characteristics of the current IT revolution. This entails not only physical robots but also technologies such as “softbots,” artificial intelligence, sensor networks, and data analytics. It involves the advent of the “Internet of Robotic Things,” or the robot internet.

 In this way the internet is being expanded with senses (sensors) and hands and feet (actuators), and, as a result of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the internet is also becoming “smart,” The management and analysis of large volumes of data is of key importance in this regard. Machines from the first and the second machine age provide scope for taking over both physical and cognitive work form humans. Whether or not such scope can be utilized depends, however, on how production and work are organized.

First machine age: rationalization of physical labor

 With the rise of scientific management, or Taylorism, in the nineteenth century the craft factory was redesigned as “a big efficient machine.” In 1980s, the advent of IT meant that the service sector also came within the grasp of industrial efficiency thinking: digital Taylorism re-organized the service sector, splitting it where possible into simple subtasks amenable to outsourcing, offshoring, reshoring, or automation. In this context, steadily increasing optimization of the use of labor takes place. The internet currently allows the advent of digital platforms, which can operate with relatively little capital and labor.

THE SECOND MACHINE AGE IS DIGITAL TAYLORISM

In the second machine age, and through the advent of IT, the services sector since the early 1980s came under the influence of (digital) Taylorism. Where mechanical Taylorism allows the automation of physical work, digital Taylorism allows the automation of cognitive work. As a result, it has become possible to outsource, offshore, or automate not only physical but also cognitive tasks. Taking about new and more efficient ways of organizing things has received fresh impetus since 1995, owing to the arrival of the internet.

The internet boosts the internationalization, flexibilization, and “platformization” of work. We can see the advent of the virtual network organization which seeks to optimize on-demand access to paid and unpaid work. This body of idea underpins, for example, the way in which Uber uses drivers.

LEAN PRODUCTION AND MASS PERSONALIZATION

For most industrial practices, ever closer cooperation between digital and human labor is more obvious solution than full automation. This approach is known as lean production. As in Taylorism, the pursuit of cost reduction and greater efficiency is of key importance here. Encouraged by the post-ware scarcity of materials in Japan, Toyota developed lean production in the 1950s. This approach combines the advantages of raft work and mass production because it avoids the high costs of the former and the rigidity of the latter. 

The use of lean management is in the West coincided with the growing globalization of the economy in the 1980 and 1990s. It was no longer merely a question of optimizing production chains within the factory, but of optimizing global production chains. This enabled the further subdivision of production tasks, further specialization and the relocation of production. Regional out-sourcing came to be supplemented by global offshoring: the relocation of a plant, and thus labor, to a low-wage country. This initially affected low-skilled physical labor with little added value.

THE DIGITAL INTERNET ECONOMY

Since the beginning of this century, many new digital tools have risen not only for tracking the production process within the factory more closely but also for gaining an understanding of consumer behavior and the way in which products are used outside the factory gate. Optimization, therefore, no longer focuses purely on production chains but on the entire value chain. The use of, for example, RFID, GPS, and video cameras is leading to an evolution from learn management to “high-resolution management,” or precision management. More and more data are becoming available on all parts of the value chain, allowing even more efficient organizational of value-chain processes. In particular, highly digitized environments allow precision management based on the analysis of large streams of data (big data). A digital environment of this kind many be a factory or a warehouse.
A French journalist describes how, when he was temporary Amazon employee, his employer monitored him every second via his scanner using wifi.

Since the mid- 1990s, the advent of the World Wide Web has further bolstered the process of globalization and transformed relationships both between businesses and other businesses and between businesses and their employees and customers. The internet makes it possible to share work globally more easily than before. Not only low-skilled production work is being offshored, but so to are administrative operations and high-skilled tasks with high added value such as programming, product design, and R&D.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

The first machine age refers to the first and second industrial revolution, the era in which steam engine, internal combustion engines, and electrical machines took over the muscle power of human and animals. The second machine age is another term for the third industrial revolution, the current information revolution.

However, the terms “first machine age” and “second machine age” are of key importance in the current debate about technology and labor. The first machine age entails machines that mechanical power while second entails machines that provide thinking power. We need to consider how the thinking machines (computer, robots, the internet, artificial intelligence) might change us. An important question sir the extent to which we in the current age can learn from the first machine age.