Posts Tagged ‘carpet sweeper’
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”*…
… something that nature seems to know. The population of the world, now roughly 8.1 billion, seems poised to shrink. To some, this is good news; to others, a cause for alarm. Phoebe Arslanagić-Wakefield and Anvar Sarygulov, co-founders of Boom, fall into that latter camp. But their provocative analysis of the dynamics of the Baby Boom is relevant to anyone concerned with the future of population on earth…
… In the countries that it touched, the Baby Boom created generations massive in size. In the US alone, 76 million babies were born in its peak 18 years, 30 million more than were born in the previous 18, a demographic difference bigger than the 1960 population of Egypt, the Philippines, or Ethiopia. By 1965, people born during the Baby Boom made up 40 percent of America’s population.
Today, a fifth of both the UK’s and the USA’s population are baby boomers and we live in the world they created. Despite that, as mentioned above, the most widely known piece of information about the Boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War Two.
The Baby Boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war: it saw total lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children but had more of them overall. And in many countries, including the US, UK, Sweden and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started, while neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced Booms that began during the war, in 1940.
Instead, to explain the Baby Boom, we must consider why it was that the iron law of fertility – that as incomes go up, births must come down – was suspended for this extraordinary period of time…
Fascinating and important: “Understanding the Baby Boom,” from @PMArslanagic and @ASarygulov.
By way of further background on our current situation: “Population bomb, bust – or boon? New UNFPA report debunks 8 myths about a world of 8 billion.“
[image above: source]
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As we grapple with growth, we might send hygienic birthday greetings to Melville Bissell; he was born on this date in 1843. An inventor and entrepreneur, he created and marketed the first modern carpet sweeper… which, as explained in the article featured above, was a seminal contribution to the advances in household technology that helped fuel the Baby Boom.
“The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are”*…
Roomba is on the rise, but is the humble carpet sweeper poised for a rebound? Edward Tenner considers…
Every so often technology critics charge that despite the exponential growth of computer power, the postwar dreams of automated living have been stalled. It is true that jetpacks are unlikely to go mainstream, and that fully autonomous vehicles are more distant than they appear, at least on local roads. And the new materials that promised what the historian of technology Jeffrey L. Meikle has called
“damp-cloth utopianism”—the vision of a future household where plastic-covered furnishings would allow carefree cleaning—have created dystopia in the world’s oceans.Yet a more innocent dream, the household robot, has come far closer to reality: not, it is true, the anthropomorphic mechanical butler of science-fiction films, but a humbler machine that is still
impressive, the autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner. Consider, for example, the Roomba®. Twenty years after introducing the first model, the manufacturer, iRobot, sold itself to Amazon in August 2022 for
approximately $1.7 billion in cash. Since 2013, a unit has been part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.As the museum site notes, the first models found their way by bumping into furniture, walls, and other obstacles. They could not be programmed to stay out of areas of the home; an infrared-emitting
accessory was needed to create a “virtual wall.” Like smartphones, introduced a few years later, Roombas have acquired new features steadily with a new generation on average every year. (They have also inspired a range of products from rival manufacturers.) Over 35 million units have been sold. According to Fortune Business Insights Inc., the worldwide market was nearly $10 billion in 2020 and is estimated to increase from almost $12 billion in 2021 to $50.65 billion in 2028.…
Adam Smith might applaud the Roomba as a triumph of the liberal world order he had endorsed. Thanks to the global market- place for design ideas, chips, and mechanical parts, he might remark,
a division of labor—Roomba is designed mainly in the United States by an international team and manufactured in China and Malaysia—has benefited consumers worldwide. Smith would nonetheless
disapprove of the economic nationalism of both the United States and China that has made managing high-technology manufacturing chains so challenging.Yet Smith might also make a different kind of observation, high-lighting the technology’s limits rather than its capabilities…
Yet Smith might also make a different kind of observation, high-lighting the technology’s limits rather than its capabilities… Could household automation be not only irrelevant to fundamental human welfare, but harmful? As an omnivorous reader, Smith would no doubt discover in our medical literature the well-established dangers of sedentary living (he loved “long solitary walks by the Sea side”) and the virtues of getting up regularly to perform minor chores, such as turning lights on and off, adjusting the thermostat, and vacuuming the room, the same sorts of fidgeting that the Roomba and the entire Internet of Things are hailed as replacing. In fact the very speed of improvement of robotic vacuums may be a hazard in itself, as obsolescent models add to the accumulation of used batteries and environmentally hazardous electronic waste.
As the sustainability movement grows, there are signs of a revival of the humble carpet sweeper, invented in 1876, as sold by legacy brands like Fuller Brush and Bissell. They offer recycled plastic parts, independence of the electric grid, and freedom from worry about hackers downloading users’ home layouts from the robots’ increasingly sophisticated cloud storage…
Via the estimable Alan Jacobs and his wonderful Snakes and Ladders: “Adam Smith and the Roomba®” from @edward_tenner.
(Image above: source)
* Eleanor Roosevelt
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As we get next to godliness, we might spare a thought for Waldo Semon; he died on this date in 1999. An inventor with over 100 patents, he is best known as the creator of “plasticized PVC” (or vinyl). The the world’s third most used plastic, vinyl is employed in imitation leather, garden hose, shower curtains, and coatings– but most frequently of all, in flooring tiles.
For his accomplishments, Semon was inducted into the Invention Hall of Fame in 1995 at the age of 97.
“It is difficult to predict, especially the future”*…
While perfectly accurate prediction is beyond our ken, it is possible to spot indicators– early warning signs or signals– that the world is headed in one direction or another. BBC R&D Futures is an attempt to do exactly that (in the service of building understanding of the impacts that they might have, right down to the artifacts that they might spawn). For example (from a recent “signals” newsletter):
We are in an era of increasing protests
A number of recent studies tracking and understanding protests and demonstrations around the world are seeing a rise in events. One looking at demonstrations between 2006 and 2020 found that “the number of protest movements around the world had more than tripled in less than 15 years. Every region saw an increase, the study found, with some of the largest protest movements ever recorded.”
Common reasons given for protesting were ‘perceived failure of political systems or representation’, inequality, corruption, lack of action over climate change, and the sense that people’s concerns are not being addressed.
- Why is the world protesting so much? A new study claims to have some answers. – The Washington Post
- World Protests | SpringerLink
- Political protests have become more widespread and more frequent | The Economist
- The Age of Mass Protests: Understanding an Escalating Global Trend | Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Global Protest Tracker – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Concerned about the future? A useful source of social, economic, technological, environmental, and political dynamics worthy of attention: BBC R&D Futures.
* Niels Bohr
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As we seek signs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1876 that Melville Bissell patented the first carpet sweeper… one of the innovations (see here, here, e.g.) that revolutionized housekeeping… and with it, modern society.
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