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Comment by auslegung | Hacker News Reader

I read Wendell Berry quite a lot, and in one essay (I forget which) he posed a question, "where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines", or something like that. I think this washing machine is an answer to that question.

What if many of our machines used human power like they did 100 years ago, but were made far more efficient and effective than they were 100 years ago? One of the biggest health problems in America is lack of physical exercise. Biking for transportation, having a manual washing machine, etc would go a long way towards fixing that problem, while also reducing our use of electricity, gasoline, etc.

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Even the dumbest among us are clever, particularly when it comes to reducing work loads. It's not gonna be long before somebody figures out an alternative way to power that washer.

> One of the biggest health problems in America is lack of physical exercise.

I disagree. The biggest health problem is the abundance of high calorie foods that are designed to taste so good that it confuses are dumb monkey brains into eat more than we should. Limiting or eliminating the amounts of sugars and simple carbohydrates in our foods would go a long way at improving our overall health.

That's the correct answer. You can't exercise your way out of a high calorie, high sugar diet, unless you're willing to dedicate several hours per day to intense exercise. Normal exercise is an atrocious approach to countering high calorie intake, it simply can't work. You can work out for an hour, and one soda wipes it out entirely, or a couple slices of pizza.

No, the problem is and will remain dietary in nature. Americans could stop all exercise across the board, change their diets, and lose massive amounts of weight trivially, just by cutting out a few common items that nearly all obese Americans over-consume. I've yet to meet an obese American whose diet I couldn't trivially radically alter by just removing a few particularly horrible things (eg sugary drinks, ice cream, pasta/pizza, high sugar snack goods). People think they have to change everything about what they eat and go to the gym five times per week to drop weight, and that's entirely false, all they have to do is eliminate or dramatically reduce the couple worst items in their diet and that's usually enough (it's rare that there are dozens of villains in their diet that matter, it's almost always just a few items that are doing 3/4+ of the damage).

>> You can work out for an hour, and one soda wipes it out entirely, or a couple slices of pizza.

Not exactly, just because you've replaced those calories doesn't mean that your body didn't gain muscle mass which itself requires calories just for your body to maintain. This leads to a higher basal metabolic rate, which ends up burning calories even while you rest.

That’s overstated, look at say elite marathon runners who do incredible amounts of daily exercise without bulking up.

A 500 calorie workout might only be 400 extra over spending that time sitting on that couch. Similarly extra muscle on it’s own takes energy but fat also burns energy so even modest weight loss balances that out.

Being overweight also raises your metabolism. Focus on the mass, not so much the rate.

Having lots of muscle mass isn't healthier than being slim. It's healthier than being fat, but being slim is going to be a lot easier on your heart, joints, and other organs.

(Have a look at people who are 80+ and fit. Most of them are slim. You don't see a lot of bulked up old people)

Your overall point might be correct, but your old people one is just wrong.

Old people aren't super muscular because you need high levels of testosterone to support musculature, and it naturally declines with age and particularly tanks when you are elderly.

The digestive system also gradually loses the ability to absorb protein with age. Elderly people actually need more protein just to maintain muscle mass, but most of them fail to adjust their diets accordingly.

Lean muscle at rest only burns about 8 kcal/day/kg more than fat. So the metabolic effect is pretty small.

At rest sure, but you gotta carry all that extra weight around when you do anything else.

Carrying around an extra kg of weight takes roughly the same energy regardless of tissue type.

This is correct. I do cardio 10-15 hours/week and have to count my calories so I don't gain weight.

I read some research recently that showed that when you exercise you tend to be less active through the rest of the day. You balance it out without thinking about it.

I've seen that myself, a long bike ride will often be followed by an evening on the sofa.

> Americans could stop all exercise across the board, change their diets, and lose massive amounts of weight trivially, just by cutting out a few common items that nearly all obese Americans over-consume

To be fair, the yanks don't even need to change their diets to loose weight .... they just need to eradicate those stupid portion sizes.

A steak doesn't mean half the cow on your plate, a sandwich doesn't mean putting everything you can find in the shop (including the kitchen sink, if you could !) in between two slices of bread ... etc..etc..etc

Its simply grotesque.

Labor and rent are more expensive than the food. The large portions are intended to distract the consumer with the illusion they are paying primarily for food rather than a massive markup.

Free refills on sodas with waiters waiting to pounce and refill your cup every time it's 1/3 down from full, can be added to the list.

Also, soda servings in excess of 20oz (already huge!) to begin with, regardless of refills.

I upvoted this comment, but people are not so dumb to only eat junk food. There are environmental/psychological factors why people overeat. Other research shows that people will overeat "healthy food" i.e. huge dollops of olive oil, or fruit juice, because it's "healthy."

I agree that reducing bad food and portion control is the answer, but it's very hard to drive behavioral change in people. And the health industry has done a "good" job of creating medication to enable bad lifestyles i.e. metformin for Type2 Diabetes, other drugs to manage cholesterol, etc.

There's no evidence that a diet high in olive oil increases obesity or all-cause mortality.

There's plenty of evidence that eating too many calories increases obesity.

GP's point is that calories coming from a "healthy" source doesn't mean they don't count. Drenching one's salad in olive oil rather than canola oil won't help someone lose weight, nor will switching from soda to a fruit juice with the same amount of sugar in it (ancillary benefits of e.g. vitamins notwithstanding)

Lack of exercise is also a problem, regardless of overall weight. There are heart, lung, and joint health improvements.

Lots of skinny people in terrible shape out there.

I think for general health/longevity its preferable to be out of shape but slim rather than heavier but fit.

Mark Rippletoe of Starting Strength has some counterarguments to this. E.g. being fit and heavy is better for bone density than out of shape and slim so in older age one is less likely to break something.

Built is not the same as fat, though. I’m guessing Mark is arguing for building strength not for being overweight.

  BUT, you say, look at his gut. A fat slob, obviously. Can’t be healthy. Healthy is slim. I am 5’8” and weigh 225. At 5’8”, “normal” is considered to be – incredibly enough – 125-163 pounds. Overweight is 164-196, and I am “obese” at 225. In reality, my bodyfat percentage is about 24%, and a 60-year-old guy who deadlifts 500 is an anomaly in terms of muscle mass anyway.  So I’m not worried about my body composition. [1]

Mark Rippetoe argues you should build strength to be healthy, not obsess about bodyfat% for health. If you want to look good, then by all means you should try to reduce your body fat. If you want to feel good, focus on strength.

[1] https://startingstrength.com/article/your-gut-your-health-an...

Why not do both?

His philosophy is that Strength is Everything, so cutting weight or limiting calorie intake for "lean gains" limits the muscle mass (and strength) you could be gaining.

It all depends on your goals.

It's certainly valid for him to value strength above everthing else. But most of us don't, most are more interested in longevity and quality of life during those years. And so it raises the question if his lifestyle is good in those aspects or not.

This guy is certainly strong, but he is definitely overweight. He may feel fit, but his weight will make him high risk for heart attack, stroke, or diabetes.

There's no amount of training that can fix a bad diet.

That's not really true for older people. Muscle weakness is a critical risk for falls. Once a person falls and breaks a hip or something the lack of mobility typically kills them within a couple years.

American kids don't have a chance. Example: High School in Arkansas with a Sonic drive-in across the street and nothing else around it. A SLIM chance of success for a kid born into an environment like that I'd venture to guess.

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3798403,-92.2227848,3a,75y,8...

Also, I am a huge fan of Wendell Berry and this topic has so many implications that are worth exploring IMO.

They don't have food at home?

As a kid, eating at McDonald's was like a once-every-other-month treat.

McDonald’s has had the $1 menu for how many years? Even the brokest of the broke can manage to splurge on a $1 cheeseburger, $1 small fry, $1 Coke. Compared to $2.50 for a USDA subsidized school lunch which has none of the chemicals that make McDonald’s addictive.

Access to fast food, even for children, has never been easier.

What addictive chemicals are you referencing here? Sugar? Salt?

I still can’t believe they limited salt for school lunches. If you want kids to eat the meals they need to taste good, and for 99.9% of kids and teenagers the amount of salt they eat has basically no effect on their health.

I wish I could get USDA Dominos at home.

Never had it, maybe it does taste terrible.

> One of the biggest health problems in America is...

> I disagree. The biggest health problem is...

You aren't disagreeing, you're making a claim about _the biggest health problem_, while I'm making a claim about _one of the biggest health problems_.

Perhaps they are asserting that America only has one health problem?

To be fair saying "One of... is..." is a tautology and doesn't make sense to disagree with.

> To be fair saying "One of... is..." is a tautology and doesn't make sense to disagree with.

I disagree pretty strongly and can provide as many examples as you would like:

- One of the biggest health problems in America is too much bicycling

- One of the biggest health problems in America is too little automobile travel

- One of the biggest health problems in America is too much space travel

- One of the most nutritious foods is rocks.

I think instead what you mean can be best explained by reading the wikipedia article on weasel words. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

I was being facetious :)

> Even the dumbest among us are clever, particularly when it comes to reducing work loads. It's not gonna be long before somebody figures out an alternative way to power that washer.

The dean of the EE faculty when I got my MSc liked to quip that the best engineers were the lazy ones - lazy, yet bright enough to realise that if they expended some effort today, they'd be able to slack off tomorrow...

That's all well and good, but the revolution of motorized washing machines and dishwashers was to free western women of having to spend large parts of their days washing things. Making it hand powered may shorten the time vs a wash tub, but is still going to miss the positive social outcomes.

[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of this pretty cool improvement on manual washing. It seems like it will be really helpful for a lot of people until their economic situation improves.

Indeed. And having women in the workforce is literally worth trillions of dollars, far exceeding the costs of “obese Americans”.

IIUC the angle here, it’s not that they don’t go to work. It’s that rather than going to the gym, they’ll work out as they do their laundry at home.

I'm not a fan of the gym, as I prefer to stay active other ways, but I often wonder if the effort and energy expended there could be put to better use? This is perhaps an example of that.

How many men do you need before you have one horsepower?

One horsepower is .7 kW. A horse working for an hour nonstop would be .7kW hrs.

Now, how many men do you need working constantly before you have comparable strength to a 20kW generator sipping a little bit of gasoline?

Here is an olympic cyclist barely managing to toast bread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ

Electricity is nice.

The idea that a singular man can output a horsepower (~700W) for enough time to toast bread is still very impressive to me!

Clearly an Olympic-level athlete. That being said, I can't help but imagine that with some optimization, it could make the electricity generation a bit easier (maybe more RPM but less torque needed?). Clearly, the video shows him straining and pushing.

Power == RPM * Torque, converting to less torque but more RPM with gears probably would be easier.

> A horse working for an hour nonstop would be .7kW hrs.

More like 8.4kWh.

> data from the horse pulling contest at the 1925 Iowa State Fair showing that peak mechanical power output of a horse is 12-14.9 HP.

https://doi.org/10.1038/364195a0

That's peak. Average is much lower. 1 HP is supposed to be a horse on a treadmill for a full day of work. A horse in acceleration is outputting far more than that for a few seconds.

On the other hand, manual laundry was one of only a few common means of self-support for 18th century working-class women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OyW4Jx_g

Crappy jobs shouldn't have to exist just for the sake of desperate people being able to have one. A justice issue demands a justice solution, not the scraps that fall from the table.

See also: the current argument raging around minimum wage in the US, and whether the the millions of grocery-bagging and burger-flipping gigs are supposed to be something you can actually survive on, or are they just meant to be short term jobs for middle class teenagers who have no dependents or living expenses to cover? Or maybe we don't love this reality but there's nothing anyone can do about it because The Market has declared that these jobs are worth less than a living wage so whatever (obligatory FDR meme: https://imgur.com/gallery/SvuwZrm).

Yes, washing clothes was a crappy job, just like coal mining was/is in certain parts of Appalchia. That said, it was an important and necessary job in its day, and it generated valuable income for workers with no other useful skills. Removing crappy jobs and the income they generate is rarely good for the laid-off workers, especially in the absence of any social safety net. I wonder how many laundresses became washing machine mechanics, or laundromat owner-proprietors. I'm guessing the answer is "not many."

I'd certainly agree that both coal miners and laundresses deserved better wages and working conditions.

Absolutely, but of course "better wages and working conditions" has a time and place element to it as well. Coal mining conditions were obviously terrible in hindsight, but my impression is that they were considered "good jobs" at the time, with union protection and so on (depictions in media like October Sky notwithstanding).

In any case, it appears that the purpose of this human-powered laundry machine is not to put anyone doing laundry for pay out of work, but rather to allow some combination of doing laundry at home cheaper, faster, or with less physical strain (a crank may be more ergonomic than being bent over a tub, and your hands don't have to be in wet soapy water the whole time).

But wasn't the counter-intuitive result that women spent more time washing since it was so "easy" now, they could wash things much more frequently.

I can't find the reference but I did read it recently.

If the time spent stays the same but more stuff gets washed that's still a win for living standards. If you reduce the cost of something then that labor gets spent elsewhere, maybe on more of the same but then you have more to show for it. Labor hours are fairly fungible at scale like that.

Your cuts are less likely to get infected when your clothes don't have the manure you put on the field last week on them.

No [1], that's not the case. Even while we own more clothing and wash it more often, it still takes less time. You can also do other tasks while a washing machine is running.

[1]https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mfr/4919087.0011.104/--deconstr...

I do not think that your source supports your claim, although I might have missed something. To the contrary, it states:

> Although the physical labor of laundry was lessened somewhat by the machines, the actual time housewives allocated to their family laundry increased.

(This is claimed to be the result of housewives being responsible for the entirety of laundry, instead of employing help, however.)

That's the Jevons Paradox, generally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It could be, but not in the way the parent thinks. Washing machines and dish washers are what allowed women to enter the work force, but they didn't cause them to spend more time washing. It probably increased demand for freshly washed clothes and clothing in general.

The Jevons Paradox is an economy-wide effect, not (just / only) an individual one.

Cheaper washing machines mean more clothes, more laundry, more people washing more often.

Individuals may spend less time doing laundry. But more laundry is being done, above and beyond simply meeting previous latent demand.

Right, I was clarifying that it didn't in this case mean more time spent washing at an individual level, the resource here is probably labor.

I don't think that's the case for washing machines, but it is the case for some inventions. Like the typewriter, which allows you to write four-five times faster than when using a pen, and communications networks that are however many million times faster than carrier pigeons and pony expresses and what have you... So we should be spending less time writing and sending letters, and more time frolicking in the sun, right?

You should take a look at the Low-tech Magazine[1]: there are several articles where the possibility of brinding back some outdated but still intersting technology is explored. For example DC transmission lines, wooden wind turbines, sailing ships for transporting goods, compressed air energy storage, etc. There's also an analysis on basing a society on human power[2].

[1]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com

[2]: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/could-we-run-modern-...

"where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines"

As tractors started to become common, the Horse and Mule Association, in conjunction with, I think, Iowa State University, did considerable work on optimizing plowing with horses. The optimal angle between horse and plow (17° below horizontal) was worked out experimentally. A clever set of standard harness parts was worked out, with equalizers so none of the horses in the hitch could slack off.

Didn't help much. Improved things maybe 20%, after which they'd hit an optimum. Those who farm with horses today do use those optimized techniques; they're in draft horse books. But tractors are just better.

Freeing people from the tedium of ordinary housework (as can still be witnessed in parts of Mexico, Philippines, etc.) allows for innovation.

Half the population alive would likely not been born or survived to adulthood if we had followed a steampunkish model of industrialization and progress.

We'd probably have more pollution as well.

> "where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines"

The bicycle, I guess.

Thank god for bicycles. We could use more inventions like that.

I can't find a citation for this, but a favorite quote of mine from Twain(?) is:

"The bicycle is unique in that it's engine is also it's cargo."

I always liked Steve Jobs's description of the Mac as "a bicycle for the mind." It's not like he was unaware of the Ferrari or whatever, he chose to use a human-powered vehicle for his analogy.

Until the invention of the pogo stick. Which the internet informs me was only a few years later...

Apparently the combustion engine was invented before the bicycle as bikes need ball bearings to function smoothly, which also requires advanced machinery.

https://www.ft.com/content/9084f6ad-6146-4b38-8e7c-faf850f90...

Indeed! Interesting. According to wikipedia it may have been a feedback loop primarily in the direction of the car.

> The bicycle's invention has had an enormous effect on society, both in terms of culture and of advancing modern industrial methods. Several components that eventually played a key role in the development of the automobile were initially invented for use in the bicycle, including ball bearings, pneumatic tires, chain-driven sprockets and tension-spoked wheels.

There's a story about the introduction of a scythe to a remote village in - I want to say - 90s or early 2000s, and the mayor thanking the charity for showing them this new invention, that really helped them during harvest. It's not like the place didn't have sticks or blades, but the combination isn't obvious.

I saw it on a TIL on reddit, so take it with a grain of salt. Trying to google it now, but all results for queries containing the word "scythe" seems to be related to a board game.

There's Scythe Works Without Borders:

https://scytheworks.ca/scythe-works-without-borders/

They seem to be active in Nepal. There are other similar groups elsewhere.

This DDG search turns up several: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=introducing+scythe+village+-game&i...

Including a Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/i14bak/oddly_mesmer...

It's not even that the combination isn't obvious; it's also that the orientation of the parts is touchy and makes the difference between "I could do this all day!" and "Can I please just hold the knife in my hands?"

For some reason I have a scythe in my shed. I've used it a couple of times when my lawn mower was dead after I came back from holiday and the grass and weeds were waist high. It's surprisingly efficient and easy to use as soon as you get the hang of it.

I read a series of novels called “The World Made by Hand,” which take more of a slow collapse approach to post-apocalyptic fiction. One part of the books that stood out was how important it is, both in terms of overall health and hygiene as well as morale, to have clean clothes. Some members of the town opened a town laundry where they would boil clean the clothes of their customers. Great series overall.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is an excellent novel set in a future in which "carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices [0]." There are also genetically-engineered animals that are particularly strong and good at converting food calories into kinetic energy (for winding storage springs or other uses) and treadle-powered desktop computers [1], like sewing machines before electricity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadle

>"where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines"

I really enjoy questions like this! One area you can see this in practice is in the field of valve amplifiers, they're hideously inefficient and unreliable when compared to modern transistor amplifiers but there's huge numbers of guitarists and HiFi enthusiasts (myself included) who love the subjective qualities of the sound they make, so an effectively obsolete technology has been kept around and developed far longer than its "natural" lifespan and looks likely to be for a long while yet.

Radio is another example of subcultures further developing "obsolete" tech, things like Morse code have been kept in modern use and further developed by amateur radio enthusiasts long after its commercial demise as a tool for communication, and even after AM radio's heavy decline in Europe you can still hear hobbyist pirates on Sunday mornings (especially from the Netherlands) keeping the ionosophere warm on those frequencies.

We don't have much, no dish washer, no dryer, only one car in the extended family but I wouldn't want to let go of the washing machine. The reality would be a lot of drudgery traded off against wearing clothes long after they became dirty.

You might like this manual cement mixer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpxl5JizNc4

"Improving on ... the plow". If I remember my history, there's a perplexing story around the asian (chinese?) plow and the highly inefficient (but necessary?) european plow that didnt improved for hundreds of years.

People 100-150 years ago washed their clothes one a month (victorian England). Rich families had more clothes and extra help; they could afford to have clean clothes.

By using more efficient mechanical washing machines the effect wouldn't be more people with bulging biceps, they would just smell more. But slightly less than the victorians.

One example where both are fairly common is coffee equipment. Obviously you've got big automatic grinders & espresso machines in most cafes, but it's quite common for coffee enthusiasts to use a hand grinder and AeroPress or V60 at home or for travel.

> I read Wendell Berry quite a lot, and in one essay (I forget which) he posed a question, "where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines"

We'd still have slaves. That's where we'd be.

The development of steam, IC, and electric machinery is what actually put an end to slavery, by making it uneconomic.

Slavery (or near-equivalents, such as serfdom) was a constant of virtually all human societies above the hunter-gatherer band level, until the development of powered equipment.

Emancipation happened over 100 years ago, so no that is not what would have happened when imagining an alternative future starting 100 years in the past.

> Emancipation happened over 100 years ago,

So did the introduction of steam, IC, and electric machinery. Your quibble is with the OP.

Emancipation happened right around the time of the introduction of large-scale steam power.

This was not a coincidence.

That also doesn't apply to the conversation, which was about a branch of history that could have started 100 years ago, not 160 years ago.

The "conversation", such as it is, had its origin in the OP (or the person he's citing) incorrectly stating that the power revolution happened 100 years ago. It didn't.

Now, some might try to argue that the process of eliminating slavery/serfdom just happened to coincide with the development of non-human-powered machinery (like maybe humans just somehow became more moral and less-prone to exploiting their fellow-humans).

But you know what? That's basically just a load of crap.

It doesn't explain the near-perfect correlation between the development of powered equipment and the disappearance of slavery/serfdom, world-wide, carried out over the course of centuries, appearing first (again, apparently just by coincidence) in the more technologically-advanced countries (such as Western Europe), and later in the less-technologically-advanced countries (such as Russia, Asia, and (at that time) the United States)

Water, steam, internal combustion, and electricity is what ended slavery/serfdom. Get rid of those and slavery/serfdom will be back before you know it.

Note that even within the United States, slavery disappeared first in the industrialized North, and last in the rural South.

> The "conversation", such as it is, had its origin in the OP (or the person he's citing) incorrectly stating that the power revolution happened 100 years ago. It didn't.

You are kind of inventing something that wasn't written. The OP wrote, "What if many of our machines used human power like they did 100 years ago, but were made far more efficient and effective than they were 100 years ago?"

Emancipation (at least as is taught in south american schools) was a direct result of the industrial revolution

But yet the industrial revolution, e.g. cotton gin and better ways to make textiles, made slavery more profitable for the owners.

>"where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines"

I think that is relatively straightforward. We would have sharper, lighter plows - and they would be FAR LESS effective than modern farm equipment and food wold be more expensive.

This would be a bad thing and I'm glad we don't live in that world.

100 years ago was 1921. We had many very advanced electric, internal combustion, and external combustion (e.g. steam) machines.

> In the 1920s, mass production led to falling prices for washing machines (Cowan, 1983, p. 94). As of 1926, 80% of affluent households studied by market researchers in 36 American cities had washing machines. Only 28% of homes in small town Zanesville, Ohio had electric washers. Most of those with washing machines were among the affluent homes (Cowan, 1983, p. 173). During the single year of 1936, over 1.4 million washing machines were sold in the U.S., and the average price had dropped by more than half. However, many could not afford washing machines during the Great Depression (Cohen, 1982, p. 95).

https://evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com/washing-machines-...

Tractors on farms were already pretty common and became more so over that decade.

> In August, 1917, a small tent city was erected in Fremont, Nebraska. Under the canvas, 48 tractor companies exhibited their wares. There were over 300 tractor models on display worth over $1.5 million. But that was only a fraction of the tractors being offered to farmers in the 1920s. The number of tractor manufacturer peaked in 1921 when there were 186 different firms trying to entice farmers to buy their tractors. The next decade saw amazing changes in the technology, and more and more farmers moving from farming with horses to farming with tractors.

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe20s/machines_08.ht...

While air travel wasn't something the common person would do, planes weren't rare and commercial air travel was in its infancy.

https://www.century-of-flight.net/commercial-aviation-indust...

The in-home electric refrigerator wouldn't appear until 1927, but in 1921 the technology was known and used in industry.

https://evolutionhomeappliances.weebly.com/refrigerators-190...

https://bigchill.com/us/blog/refrigerators-through-the-decad...

While I understand your sentiment, it's wrong to portray the early 20th century (or even the 19th century) as a technological backwater. We have certainly made advancements in material sciences and electronics (e.g. computers) in the past 100 years that have arguably changed many, many things; I don't think an engineer from 1921 would be lost in understanding the mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and non-computer electrical technology we have today.

For what it's worth, I do wish we, as a society, had chosen or will choose to move to less energy-intensive means of living. I try to do my part, for instance I live somewhere where I can walk to 80% of the places I want to go or could take public transit to about 90% and I use a reel mower when the grass isn't too high. Even as, maybe especially as, a software engineer I hate that more and more devices are becoming computerized, or worse "smart" or "connected". Computers are wonderful, but my toaster oven and refrigerator doesn't need one, thank you very much. I also try to avoid single-use plastics when possible an purchase better quality items to last longer when possible.

Don't get me wrong, there are many conveniences that I personally wouldn't give up (clothes washing machine), but in general I think we could stand to reëvaluate much of our culture and civilization in terms of energy and material usage.

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