Industrial society is over

Ever since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago, the world has been shaped with the maxim to end of piece work, terminating most cottage (meaning single person) output, and transitioning to a cohesive workplace where workers come together, each as part of the process, manufacturing goods, services, and product. Factories became the norm, mines were reorganized to train miners each to a singular task, leather workers tasked with portions of the whole making shoes as component parts, wheelwrights tasked for single spokes instead of the whole wheel, engine builders becoming specialists with pistons, cranks, molding individually, never together.

The whole point of the industrial society is that you mastered a single task and were a repetitive integral part of that physical process, making corporate end product dependent on assembly of product designed and compartmentalized to allow corporate structure to oversee the whole. We became an industrial society – workers and management, services and delivery, sales and marketing.

Some say we are now in a new industrial revolution. Revolution? For sure, but industrial? When every component portion of industry can now be made by machine or robotics, the age of humans fitting into the old Industrial Revolution pattern is over, redundant. We’ve begun a move to the knowledge revolution, wherein only knowledge and individual learning and intelligence determine societal structure.

Look, a robot can easily replace a car assembly worker. $35,000 and you’re done; a new “worker” capable of 24/7 operation, no pension, no benefits. For every 50 robots you need a technician, a knowledgeable technician, a human currently (until robots simply unplug, allow a replacement automatically in place, and take themselves off to a scrapyard). Same goes for all miners, truck drivers along freeways, airlines wanting AI and only one pilot in the cockpit, Madison Ave. using machine learning to design marketing campaigns, or Amazon firing warehouse workers for robots.

Some current trades, often thought of as menial labor, will have to reap greater respect. The knowledge of a plumber, fixing existing pipes and sanitation, are very specifically specialist-empowered — plumbers are a knowledge based industry. As are electricians, doctors, nurses, astronauts, teachers, and a host of other “trained” humans with complicated variables in their learning and output. Training is gaining knowledge, experience is improving that specialist knowledge — knowledgeable people are indispensable in the new society we are forging.

But the truth is, the shift from industrial to knowledge-based societal structures will be painful. The least educated will be — as they were in the mid-1800s — the worst hit. Deemed marginal consumers, marginal capitalist participants, some in power will either seek to take advantage by claiming to be “on their side” for political control or politicians in power will degrade social and medical services to allow the poorest, least educated, to perish. Make no mistake, there are already restructuring forces at workin America — either by design or by inevitable outcome of the switch from industry to knowledge. Gone already are the lifetime jobs’ plans and structures, job mobility is already the norm. Education (gaining knowledge and therefore a place in the new societal structure) has become more and more expensive — increasing the societal divide. Apprentices are gaining traction, as they did in the 1800s, to ensure specialist knowledge supports a sustainable societal future — everyone needs a plumber, car mechanic, nurse, electrician.

It is a brave new world, one which may well flourish, but currently is being undertaken by subterfuge, hiding the reality from civilians, workers, families — all who want to plan for their future. Without knowing what the future may hold — unless you are an architect or purveyor of the new knowledge society — most people haven’t got a clue. And history has shown that deliberate — but secret except for a few at the top — new societal change is going to hurt everyone, everywhere. The question is: How big will the backlash be?

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.