FREDDIE DEBOER: The Indoor Plumbing Test. What can AI enable you to do that you couldn’t already do by other means?
Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.
So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine – cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.
That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!
In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis explored the massive economic boost the benefits of the Industrial Revolution brought in the first half of the 20th century:
In late October 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in New York City for several days, deluged the subway system and most of the road tunnels leading into Manhattan, and disrupted voice and data communication as flooding damaged a key switching facility in lower Manhattan. For a brief stretch, the financial capital of the world wasn’t New York City, as the New York Stock Exchange had to close for two consecutive days. As Robert Gordon writes in The Rise and Fall of American Growth:
Sandy pushed many of its victims back to the nineteenth century. Residents of New York City below Thirty-Fourth Street learned what it was like to lose the elevators that routinely had carried them to and from their apartments.… Anyone who had no power also lost such modern inventions as electric lighting, air-conditioning and fans to ventilate dwelling spaces, and refrigerators and freezers to keep food from spoiling. Many residents had no heat, no hot food, and even no running water. Those living in New Jersey were often unable to find gasoline needed for commuting because gas station pumps could not function without electricity. Moreover, communication was shut off after batteries were drained on laptops and mobile phones.
For a brief time, New Yorkers didn’t have access to the great inventions that made what Gordon has termed the special century of rapid economic and productivity growth from the 1870s to early 1970s. Three of the most important emerged within three months in 1879: the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and radio, Gordon points out. These were fundamental “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that spun off scores of inventions that made the modern world New Yorkers currently enjoy. (“What great births you have witnessed,” wrote Mark Twain to Walt Whitman on the latter’s seventieth birthday, referring to those and other mechanical marvels of the age.) And, crucially, of all those Sandy-created deprivations, the one probably most tolerable was the dodgy wireless service. While we all love the ability to stay in touch with everyone and everything at all times, it still probably places well behind the lack of hot food, water, a heated home, and mobility (well, for most of us who aren’t Twitter addicts, at least).
This difference between losing the marvels of the latter part of the Industrial Revolution (or Second Industrial Revolution) and losing those of the Information Technology and Communications Revolution (or Third Industrial Revolution) helps illustrate the nature of the slowdown that began with the Great Downshift. Those special century inventions changed life in such a profound and unrepeatable way and across so many dimensions of our lives, Gordon argues, that it’s hard to imagine living without them. And while these inventions had a massive impact on American life, their effect on productivity had been exhausted by the early 1970s. And the one-off nature of them means they can’t be repeated. Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower. Progress after 1970 certainly continued, but it was focused more narrowly on entertainment, communication, and information technology—important advances, but none that created a second Up Wing golden age of the sort imagined during the 1960s. At least not yet. They were significant enough to create a productivity blip in the late 1990s and early 2000s that has since faded. “[The] invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a… temporary, rather than a permanent, upswing in the pace of progress,” Gordon writes. His skepticism about the IT Revolution is the empirical conclusion that is referenced by the “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” meme.
“Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower.” Indeed.™