Hacker News Reader

Comment by qikInNdOutReply | Hacker News Reader

So why did it not win? The answer.

Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services.

Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natural" order of things seaps into relgion and culture such that to perform science is to dare the gods.

PS: There are tons of good alternate history .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt

View on HN

Slaves might explain lack of interest in labour saving technology in general, but the steam engine in particular mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed transport) or enabled production processes particularly well suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile production). The UK's Industrial Revolution began with slave-picked cotton being spun on machines attended by abundant unskilled labour and powered by watermills, a technology the Romans (and many other non-industrial civilisations) exploited with smaller scale machinery.

The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations in many aspects of it and have people willing to document their pure research into steam (which as the article acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the same level of demand and competition for new products etc etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)

> the steam engine in particular mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed transport) or enabled production processes particularly well suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile production).

I think there’s a bit more to it: “high speed” is something which took a long time to be true. A lot of these things were simpler applications which seem to have big situational components: if you have literal tons of coal and ore to haul, plus relatively amenable terrain, but not competition from boats, iron to make rails and boilers, and a good source of fuel (coal or wood) steam engines are a great investment. Similarly, if you have fixed industrial demand and abundant fuel but not water power, stationary engines make sense.

If you have different answers for enough of those points, it’s hard to justify the development - it took the Europeans a couple of centuries in starting in the 1600s, after their population already exceeded Rome’s, and as you mentioned they already had or started a lot of related technologies, too. An agrarian society, a hilly one, land without lots of easily available fuel, etc. might not have had it ever make sense or only after someone else has made multiple generations of technology development.

Slavery is a big part of the answer, but Hero's device can not be scaled up to do useful work without consuming vast quantities of fuel, even in comparison to the low standard of efficiency set by Newcomen's engine.

> with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed.

Which is why our word for the ultimate automaton--the "robot," comes from the Czech robotnik, or forced laborer/slave.

Isn't that kind of the other way around?

Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.

>OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.

Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.

> If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.

They absolutely could if there was any political desire to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice this doesn’t seem to be compatible with democracy. Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or democracy but their government does have to pay attention to public opinion which is why they use less migrant labor than the Gulf monarchies.

Certainly. Once you're talking about a massive underclass with no real agency--whether literal slaves or not--there are all sorts of implications for the structure of that society. See SM Stirling's Draka books for example.

It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any present-day jobs except very menial service tasks.

Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.

This is actually completely incorrect. Slavery has and always will be profitable and it is still something being experienced by millions of people today.

>Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver

Again I see how one might expect this to be true but it isn't.

some industries where slavery is widespread:

- Sex work - ocean fishing - mining

I'm sure there are others

Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the important slaves held a good factory job.

Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.

> I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.

Even that one seems available:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokollu_Mehmed_Pasha

That you can find some examples of a tiny minority slaves doing some highly-skilled jobs does not contradict the statement that it's unlikely that slavery as an institution would be compatible with a modern economy, even ignoring the obvious moral evil it represents.

Also, just by the way, we ought to be able to talk without implying that other people have "those tendencies". There is simply no reasonable way a comment about the structure of an industrialized economy can be constructed as "having those tendencies". Appending "slavery = bad" to every comment is tiresome, there is such a thing as context.

I think the point is more that you can't give a slave a truck with a tank of gas and expect to see either again.

Sure you can - so long as you have a police force that will check up on things once in a while. Or at least you have convinced the slaves that the police force will catch them and life will be worse after they are caught.

Up to a point, sure.

But I think there is a point when it makes more sense to just pay the guy a wage, instead of running a big expensive police state controlling everything...

Depends on the scale of the slavery. Once it’s systemic you can even have slaves even enforcing the rules on each other (see military conscripts).

Those septic trucks in dubai are surely not driven by arabs.

Just because someone is born into poor circumstances without many options for upward mobility doesn't make them stupid. Furthermore, truck driver isn't a particularly low skill occupation. I couldn't drive an 18-wheeler. Can you? And something like taxi driving mostly seems low skill because most adults in industrialized society have been driving since they were relatively young.

It's not a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that I'm implying they're stupid.

I think it is. That was pretty much the impression it gave me.

The skill was in having a map of London in your head.

What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work? Modern industrialised economies have plenty of tools to simulate the effects of slavery. Although without the fun stuff like whipping and other forms of gratuitous cruelty.

In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where the buying party has it way better than the selling party.

> What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work?

No, it's the notion that you have second-class citizens or even non-citizens with limited legal rights enforced by the state, said limitations usually being in the realm of property rights, personal freedoms, etc. At least that is fairly easy to define, whereas "grossly under compensating someone" is a vastly more nebulous term (who decides what is and isn't "under-compensating"?)

Not even close!

At its essence slavery is complete ownership of another person. Whether or not you put that person to "work" is a separate issue.

> What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work?

Try starting with the textbook definitions. Pretty much the defining factor of being a slave is that you are owned by someone else and have to follow their orders. You can be highly compensated and still a slave (see the myriad of anecdotes about “kind” slave owners who paid them well).

Want to tell if you're being exploited or enslaved? Leave.

If a gang of armed men kidnap, brand, and return you, you're enslaved.

This begs a question: what technologies are inhibited by a looser definition of slavery? What inventions would arise if a global minimum wage was enforced?

Thank you for this book recommendation. Am reading it now and loving it! What other alternate history books are your favorites? (I'm holding my notepad ready.)

> Labour was cheap and plenty

That is a misconception. Slaves were expensive: one slave was about a soldier's pay for an entire year; and things made using manual labor, too, were very expensive - if you had to buy them, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com