Back to the farm

Today, we are bombarded with parallels between technology – especially artificial intelligence – and the industrial revolution. McKinsey has called AI the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Trump’s White House also uses this analogy in its “Winning the Race” AI action plan. Demis Hassabis, founder of Google’s Deep Mind, has claimed that artificial intelligence will be “10 times bigger than the industrial revolution – and maybe 10 times faster”.

Is this analogy, to quote the late, great, Douglas Adams, “a load of dingo’s kidneys”? I think so, and here’s why.

The agricultural revolution

Just before the Industrial Revolution got under way, an earlier dramatic social and economic change had just taken place. Another revolution, in agriculture, and another dramatic sequence of reforms, including, among others, enclosures and large-scale trade networks, that reshaped society, and especially employment.

Innovations, such as drainage¹, introduced new ways to improve the productivity of the land. New crops were introduced, like potatoes. This cycle of land improvement and crop innovation led to a process of consolidation, where land – especially what had been less productive land that had previously been shared – was enclosed and became the exclusive property of larger landowners. Large landowners became larger, tenant farmers — previously the main driver of productivity— became less important. A transportation system emerged, allowing goods to be traded outside the local area.

The net result was that fewer labourers were needed to farm the same land for the same level of productivity. Many were displaced, forced to move off the land, either to cities or even overseas. eventually forming the workforce needed to drive the later Industrial Revolution.²

Meet Patrick Sellar

As a child with family roots in Scotland, I was regularly told stories of one of the more ignominious characters: Patrick Sellar, factor of the Sutherland Estates in northern Scotland. Sellar was from a farm labourers’ family, a self-made man, lawyer, beneficiary of a Scottish educational system that was surprisingly good at enabling social mobility on occasion.

Sellar’s view throughout was that evicting people from the land and replacing them by sheep was, in fact, morally correct, a Good Thing³. Displacement was the right course of action. His “modern” world, shaped by the views of Adam Smith — a contemporary of Sellar and key influencer of the Scottish Enlightenment — was that these skills no longer had value in Scotland. (And that in Canada and elsewhere, they might.) Displacement was the invisible hand, pushing the farm labourers into a different and more productive life.⁴

Whatever his views, Sellar’s methods in the Clearances — and those of his contemporaries — were brutal. Sellar literally burned out villages. To this day, Strathnaver has an eerie silence among the stone walls of the old villages, and Sellar remains the face of the Clearances and associated with the desolation that remains today.

Displacement

Displacement, then, is not a new phenomenon. To this day we live with questions of how to handle an old industry that has, in effect, become non-viable. The same discussions happened about coal mining in the 1980s.

Instead, displacement is the traditionally Conservative response to a changed economy. It is an incentive for workers with obsolete skills to retrain themselves for this new world. In this framing, displacement is to be welcomed, not avoided. It should not be a surprise that the same framing is being applied to today’s programmers, call centre workers, and even artists. Of course, that doesn’t make it right.

As with other displacements, and as with Sellar, it is hard to disentangle the desire for self-aggrandizement from the belief in a greater good. Sellar himself grew wealthy as a tenant sheep farmer among the ruins of the villages he had burned. When I look at the White House AI Action Plan, I see McKinsey, DOGE and their ilk as modern Patrick Sellars — I am sure they genuinely believe COBOL programmers should learn AI, but I am equally sure they want to be the vendors. Displacement of others is good for their business.

The technology sector and agriculture compared

There are notable parallels between the systemic structures of today’s technology sector and the transformed agricultural world. As today’s technology sector has leveraged local monopolistic power to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, so enclosure and displacement had the same effect in agriculture.

Agriculture	Technology
Landowners	Investors, multinational corporations
Tenant farmers	Small companies
Labourers	Employees

At the top of today’s technology sector is a small cadre of investors, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, Larrys Page and Ellison, but there are many others. These correspond to traditional landowners. They directly control most of the wealth and assets – and set the rules for the participation of others. They are, by and large, beyond regulation – to all intents and purposes, they are the regulators.

Subordinate to the investors are companies, of two types. The very large companies (“Big Tech”, e.g., Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and so on) are effectively landowners in their own right. They are active consolidators, acquiring and dominating the more productive entities within their sphere of influence,

Smaller companies have a very different relationship. They are effectively subordinate to the investor class. They correspond to tenant farmers in agriculture. The wealth of the investors depends on them, and they in turn depend on rights provided by their owners. They have surprisingly little autonomy.

And finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, the employees are the labourers. They do not, in fact, own the products of their labour, but they are paid solely for the value of their effort in production. This is where displacement happens.

The technology sector as a property system

So I for one do not believe the parallels with the Industrial Revolution are particularly useful. The Industrial Revolution did not really cause mass displacement, it recruited from the earlier one.

No, what we are face with is a second phase of modernization, where industry is being transformed in the same way that agriculture was before the Industrial Revolution. The displacement is the displacement of the workers of industry, and I don’t believe anyone has a clue how this will play out socially.

It’s worth noting that a “technology sector” as a concept is a relatively new phenomenon. The word itself was scarcely used during the Industrial Revolution and only truly gained prominence after the Second War. Although the concept of technology existed long before that, the first glimmerings of what might become today’s technology sector arose after the Second War, in the likes of IBM. Before that, although research organizations (such as Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory) did exist, they were vendors. They didn’t aim to replace systems themselves the way the likes of Amazon and Uber try to today.

As in the agricultural revolution, the transformation of participants from passive participants in existing economies to active creators of new ones, that was a relatively speedy process. As in the agricultural revolution, the same processes of consolidation are at play today. Technology’s big estates are growing and becoming more and more powerful.

If you don’t believe me, think about YouTube, for one. It has strong parallels to a landed estate. Monetization algorithms change at the whims of the owners. Rules are entirely controlled by the owners. And yet, it is the labourers within the “YouTube Estate” that are generating all the revenues that they benefit from.

Artificial intelligence and transformation

So where does artificial intelligence fit in this? We can see the narrative of displacement is already a force to be reckoned with. We can see that the number of actual vendors in the space is relatively small – as with industry, wealth itself limits modernization to the wealthy.

And I, for one, brought up on stories of the Clearances, and with memories of Strathnaver in its aftermath, look on those who eagerly promote displacement as the descendants of Patrick Sellar: people who would burn down your house in their search for profit, while firmly believing that it is all in your own interests.

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Notes

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