From the Plow to the Pill: How Technology Shapes Our Lives

For centuries, the creation of innovative technology—from steam engines and automobiles to computers and smartphones—has dramatically changed the nature of our work. Less deeply understood has been the impact of technology on the inner currents of our personal lives, according to Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar.

In fact, as many life-altering technologies have come into play, they have upended long-held beliefs about love, sex, marriage, and reproduction, says Spar in the new book Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny, which was published this week.

“Technological change doesn’t just stay in board rooms and companies,” she says. “It drives our most intimate personal relationships as well.”

Spar, the MBA Class of 1952 Professor of Business Administration at HBS, argues that crucial periods of innovation spurred profound social and interpersonal changes: The invention of the plow, for instance, led to the beginnings of monogamy and marriage. And in the 20^th century, washing machines, automobiles, and contraceptives helped free women from the “cult of domesticity” and ignite feminism.

“The machines we create begin to recreate us as well, to change the work we do, the lives we lead, and what we define as good,” Spar writes. “As technology evolves, in other words, so do we.”

In this interview, Spar provides more detail about the links between critical pieces of technology and significant social shifts and explores how the latest tech tools, including cell phones and robots, are bound to once again fundamentally reshape notions about our relationships.

Dina Gerdeman: Can you explain how the plow is responsible for creating monogamy and marriage as we know it today?

Debora Spar: This is a long and complicated causal link, and I can’t prove it definitively, but the evidence is pretty clear: As society moved from hunting and gathering, and we developed settled agriculture, we moved out of the social structure that was known as a tribe to what we now think of as the family.

Farming prompted this change. When people were hunters and gatherers, they didn’t have private property. If you were moving every day, you couldn’t have a lot of things. But once you start to farm, you need things like tools and seeds and land, and you need to have some sense of ownership around them. You also need a labor force that will work this land and inherit it for the future.

"What I try to underscore in the book is that those fights would have been harder to win without the technology that enabled women to control their reproductive lives."

As a result, people at the start of the Agricultural Revolution began to need their children in ways that were unprecedented before the advent of farming. And as this revolution unfolded, women increasingly became valued for their reproductive labor, and the family as we have come to think of it—bound by marriage and monogamy—replaced the tribe as a dominant social structure.

It’s not very romantic, but that’s what happened.

Gerdeman: You say the development of the steam engine in 1760 not only launched the Industrial Revolution and changed how people worked, but also transformed the concept of the family. How did it create a division of labor between men and women?

Spar: If you think about the world in the Middle Ages, the dominant economic unit was the family farm. People farmed the land and produced most of their own goods. There was some division of labor because women always took care of the children. But at that time it was a gentle division of labor, where labor wasn’t so sharply divided by gender or role. A man or woman might shear the sheep or feed the chickens. They acted as an economic unit together, with most people simply eking out a living however they could.

Once the Industrial Revolution led to development of the factory economy, however, there was a proliferation of wage labor, where someone in the family left home and went to a factory and worked for a wage. Interestingly, in most parts of the world, the original factory workers were women; they were the ones working in the early textile mills. But over roughly 100 to 150 years, men started to replace women in the factories. Factory jobs eventually became men’s jobs, and women were the ones who stayed home, creating what our generations inherited as the traditional division of labor.

You can see these developments in the evolution of narratives around the housewife and mother, and particularly in a popular adoration of wives and mothers that hadn’t existed before. It’s been called the cult of domesticity.

Gerdeman: Could you talk about how innovations in technology, such as the invention of the automobile and household appliances like the washing machine and dishwasher, helped spark feminism?

Spar: The causality goes through a couple phases. If you think about what happened to women in the 20th century, the automobile gave women the mobility to leave the home and go to the city or town and do tasks or a job. The automobile allowed women to move. And then the development of household appliances like the washing machine and dishwasher freed women from hours and hours of work.

As I describe in the book, most of us complain about doing laundry today, but if you compare to how it was done in the 1920s, it took hours and hours and hours to drag and spin and wash these heavy clothes. Once there were washing machines, women had considerably more time.

And once you add in electric ranges and ovens, they mathematically have even more time that allows them to pursue other things—more leisure, more time to keep their homes spotless, or for many women, more time for jobs outside the home.

Gerdeman: You say the invention of the birth control pill, and later, technologies for assisted reproduction, revolutionized the makeup of families by giving people greater control over their reproductive lives.

Spar: We forget the extent to which pregnancy dominated women’s lives throughout most of history. Until very recently, most women were spending most of their time either pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or trying not to become pregnant. In the 20th century, widespread access to contraception finally freed women from much of this reproductive burden, giving them—or at least many of them—the ability to time their children’s births to their own needs.

Once you freed women from that constant set of concerns, you gave them the liberty, at least in theory, to go into society and do other things. They could have fewer children or delay having children, and they had some greater level of agency over their lives and careers. They had choices that your mother and my mother did not.

Yes, thankfully, groups of activists have also been pushing for decades to advance the social and legal changes that give women more choices. But what I try to underscore in the book is that those fights would have been harder to win without the technology that enabled women to control their reproductive lives—and both the pill and assisted reproductive technologies have done that.

Gerdeman: Tinder is basically an opportunity to use technology to hook up. Do you think the internet has had a significant effect on our relationships and sex lives?

Spar: I think it’s changed the nature of our relationships and sex lives in fundamental ways. People are conducting their social lives online. I wrote this book before COVID-19, but COVID puts this in hyperdrive. All dating right now is online dating, whether we like it or not. I think the changes that has brought are profound. I’m a little worried about sounding like a middle-age schoolmarm, wagging her finger at young people. And I don’t think all of these changes are bad. Not at all. But things are different.

The good part is that people now have a vast range of other people with whom they can interact. People used to meet other people living in the same city. Now we’ve multiplied that a million fold. You can meet eligible people anywhere in the world, and often outside of your own social, religious, and ethnic circles.

At the same time, we know that as humans we often get baffled by all this choice. It’s much harder to settle for one person or to convince yourself that any one person is the right one when there’s a constant array of options on your phone. There’s so much choice, so if the person you thought about dating is five minutes late, some people may be inclined to say, “forget it” and move on.

And there’s a whole range of literature showing that people are becoming lonelier and more isolated and more obsessed with how their external selves are being presented. We know the Twitter-verse is a nasty place to be and that social media has created a lot of social anxiety, especially for young people.

"You can meet eligible people anywhere in the world, and often outside of your own social, religious, and ethnic circles."

Gerdeman: As new technology is introduced, there is always fear that it might replace human jobs. But do you suspect that this period we’re in now, with the internet, robots, and artificial intelligence, will have more profound effects on both our work and personal lives than previous technology advances?

Spar: There’s always a temptation to believe we’re living in the most important era of all time, and I try to steer away from that. The invention of the radio and the car and the steam engine were all equally big deals in their own time. But technological change is happening faster right now than ever before, and it’s affecting more and more aspects of our lives.

My argument is really about being proactive, both as individuals and as a society. If we’re worried about robots, we should ask what is it that actually concerns us and then put protections in place to mitigate those things. We’re not on a path over which we have no control.

We are the ones who build the robots, so if we’re worried about what we’re building, we should take that into account. I don’t think you can stop new technology; people don’t invent things and then just say, “never mind.” Robots are coming, but we humans are the ones creating them. If we want robots to do some things and not others, we should turn to governance and regulation and put those measures in place.

Gerdeman: We often fret about the downsides of technology, such as children spending too much time on screens, making parents feel guilty. Do you think we’d all be better off just accepting that technology has changed the way we spend our time?

Spar: At a minimum, parents should give themselves a break in this COVID moment, when they are trying to juggle their jobs, their parents’ health, and their kids’ screen time. We don’t know exactly how many hours kids should have on screens. The screens themselves aren’t evil any more than televisions or steam engines were.

I worry much more about what any of us are doing with those screens, rather than the screens themselves. Yes, we need to go outside and get exercise. If your kid is playing violent videogames 18 hours a day, yes, I’d be really worried. But if they’re chatting with their friends and watching some shows, that’s fine. If they’re building with blocks on Minecraft, rather than with Legos, I’m not sure that’s fundamentally different. The technology has no moral component.

And during COVID, all people are using technology more, and often in deeply personal ways. They are sitting shiva on Zoom and going to first communions on Zoom. On the one hand, it’s horrible, but on the other hand, it’s wonderful. All of us, I’m sure, miss our friends and family desperately, but we’ve also been able to connect with those who are typically more distant from us.

Gerdeman: During this pandemic, we are all relying on science and innovation so heavily now—for COVID treatments and ventilators and vaccines. Do you think this period demonstrates just how crucial innovations are since we are staking our very lives and futures on advances in science and technology?

Spar: Yes, if this moment demonstrates anything, it’s that science matters and that we need to invest more of our talent and resources to scientific inquiry. Now that doesn’t mean that scientists always get everything right. But the long history of human evolution and discovery suggests that when we harness science to broader societal ends, it generally brings us to a better place. We’re better off as a result of antibiotics, rather than without them.

I’m hoping we come out of this pandemic with at least the realization that science matters. We want to fund science better and more generously, and we want to ensure that some of our most talented young people are inspired to build careers in the fields of science and technology. We need science quite desperately right now—and we need to steer it toward the world’s most urgent concerns.

About the Author

Dina Gerdeman is a senior writer at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

[Image: Akabei]

Conclusions: Welcome to Tomorrowland

By Debora L. Spar

Technology is a tricky thing. It is our creation, a wholly human construction, yet developed now to the point where it could—might, probably will—expand beyond our human ability to either comprehend its inner workings or to completely control them. We have built the pieces—millions of them, crafted by generations of us—without a master plan for how these pieces should eventually interact and evolve.

And thus we face our future with a strange admixture of reverence and fear. Reverence for the power we have mustered and its looming ability to free us from the bodily constraints that have bound us for so long. And fear that we may have stumbled into something wrong. Something dangerous and final, something that could extinguish the will we see as being distinctly ours. It would be foolish to predict how this tension will ultimately be resolved, or how our machines will morph and coexist with us. Like our hunting-and-gathering ancestors who moved slowly toward family, or our farming ancestors who saw the first railroad racing across the horizon, we are looking toward a future whose outlines we can only barely discern. And nothing, as Frankenstein’s narrator solemnly intoned in 1818, “is so painful to the human mind as great and sudden change.”

No one today can foretell how our next-generation descendants will emerge, or how we will adapt to interact with them. Yet as we consider our creations, it is crucial to remember that the machines that we have fashioned have no goals beyond our own. No lives, no loves, no passions. Their dreams are whatever we impose on them. Therefore, as we hit the inflection point of the revolution we have wrought, we need to wrestle explicitly with what we want them to be, and how we want to live as humans among them.

As long ago as ancient Rome, we began to dream of creating our own descendants, of building machines that would become like us and allow us to be better.

Now, at last, the technology is here.

And it’s our turn to evolve.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Adapted from Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny by Debora L. Spar Copyright 2020 Debora L. Spar. All rights reserved.

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