{"id":25677,"date":"2025-02-07T15:28:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T09:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=25677"},"modified":"2025-02-07T15:28:37","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T09:43:37","slug":"timeless-virtues-new-technologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/timeless-virtues-new-technologies\/","title":{"rendered":"Timeless virtues, new technologies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Engineer and historian David Mindell\u2019s new book provides a roadmap for thinking about the future of industry. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

Peter Dizikes<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As the story goes, the Scottish inventor James Watt envisioned how steam engines should work on one day in 1765, when he was walking across Glasgow Green, a park in his hometown. Watt realized that putting a separate condenser in an engine would allow its main cylinder to remain hot, making the engine more efficient and compact than the huge steam engines then in existence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet Watt, who had been pondering the problem for a while, needed a partnership with entrepreneur Matthew Boulton to get a practical product to market, starting in 1775 and becoming successful in later years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople still use this story of Watt\u2019s \u2018Eureka!\u2019 moment, which Watt himself promoted later in his life,\u201d says MIT Professor David Mindell, an engineer and historian of science and engineering. \u201cBut it took 20 years of hard labor, during which Watt struggled to support a family and had multiple failures, to get it out in the world. Multiple other inventions were required to achieve what we today call product-market fit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full story of the steam engine, Mindell argues, is a classic case of what is today called \u201cprocess innovation,\u201d not just \u201cproduct innovation.\u201d Inventions are rarely fully-formed products, ready to change the world. Mostly, they need a constellation of improvements, and sustained persuasion, to become adopted into industrial systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was true for Watt still holds, as Mindell\u2019s body of work shows. Most technology-driven growth today comes from overlapping advances, when inventors and companies tweak and improve things over time. Now, Mindell explores those ideas in a forthcoming book, \u201cThe New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution<\/a>,\u201d published by the MIT Press. Mindell is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT, where he has also co-founded the Work of the Future initiative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve overemphasized product innovation, although we\u2019re very good at it,\u201d Mindell says. \u201cBut it\u2019s become apparent that process innovation is just as important: how you improve the making, fixing, rebuilding, or upgrading of systems. These are deeply entangled. Manufacturing is part of process innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, with so many things being positioned as world-changing products, it may be especially important to notice that being adaptive and persistent is practically the essence of improvement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYoung innovators don\u2019t always realize that when their invention doesn\u2019t work at first, they\u2019re at the start of a process where they have to refine and engage, and find the right partners to grow,\u201d Mindell says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufacturing at home<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of Mindell\u2019s book refers to British Enlightenment thinkers and inventors \u2014 Watt was one of them \u2014 who used to meet in a group they called the Lunar Society, centered in Birmingham. This included pottery innovator Josiah Wedgewood; physician Erasmus Darwin; chemist Joseph Priestley; and Boulton, a metal manufacturer whose work and capital helped make Watt\u2019s improved steam engine a reliable product. The book moves between chapters on the old Lunar Society and those on contemporary industrial systems, drawing parallels between then and now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe stories about the Lunar Society are models for the way people can go about their careers, engineering or otherwise, in a way they may not see in popular press about technology today,\u201d Mindell says. \u201cEveryone told Wedgwood he couldn\u2019t compete with Chinese porcelain, yet he learned from the Lunar Society and built an English pottery industry that led the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Applying the Lunar Society\u2019s virtues to contemporary industry leads Mindell to a core set of ideas about technology. Research shows that design and manufacturing should be adjacent if possible, not outsourced globally, to accelerate learning and collaboration. The book also argues that technology should address human needs and that venture capital should focus more on industrial systems than it does. (Mindell has co-founded a firm, called Unless, that invests in companies by using venture financing structures better-suited to industrial transformation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In seeing a new industrialism taking shape, Mindell suggests that its future includes new ways of working, collaborating, and valuing knowledge throughout organizations, as well as more AI-based open-source tools for small and mid-size manufacturers. He also contends that a new industrialism should include greater emphasis on maintenance and repair work, which are valuable sources of knowledge about industrial devices and systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve undervalued how to keep things running, while simultaneously hollowing out the middle of the workforce,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd yet, operations and maintenance are sites of product innovation. Ask the person who fixes your car or dishwasher. They\u2019ll tell you the strengths and weaknesses of every model.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All told, \u201cThe sum total of this work, over time, amounts to a new industrialism if it elevates its cultural status into a movement that values the material basis of our lives and seeks to improve it, literally from the ground up,\u201d Mindell writes in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe book doesn\u2019t predict the future,\u201d he says. \u201cBut rather it suggests how to talk about the future of industry with optimism and realism, as opposed to saying, this is the utopian future where machines do everything, and people just sit back in chairs with wires coming out of their heads.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Work of the Future<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe New Lunar Society\u201d is a concise book with expansive ideas. Mindell also devotes chapters to the convergence of the Industrial-era Enlightenment, the founding of the U.S., and the crucial role of industry in forming the republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe only founding father who signed all of the critical documents in the founding of the country, Benjamin Franklin, was also the person who crystallized the modern science of electricity and deployed its first practical invention, the lightning rod,\u201d Mindell says. \u201cBut there were multiple figures, including Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere, who integrated the industrial Enlightenment with democracy. Industry has been core to American democracy from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, as Mindell emphasizes in the book, \u201cindustry,\u201d beyond evoking smokestacks, has a human meaning: If you are hard-working, you are displaying industry. That meshes with the idea of persistently redeveloping an invention over time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the high regard Mindell holds for the Industrial Enlightenment, he recognizes that the era\u2019s industrialization brought harsh working conditions, as well as environmental degradation. As one of the co-founders of MIT\u2019s Work of the Future initiative, he argues that 21st-century industrialism needs to rethink some of its fundamentals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe ideals of [British] industrialization missed on the environment, and missed on labor,\u201d Mindell says. \u201cSo at this point, how do we rethink industrial systems to do better?\u201d Mindell argues that industry must power an economy that grows while decarbonizing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, Mindell adds, \u201cAbout 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from industrial sectors, and all of the potential solutions involve making lots of new stuff. Even if it\u2019s just connectors and wire. We\u2019re not going to decarbonize or address global supply chain crises by deindustrializing, we\u2019re going to get there by reindustrializing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mindell hopes the audience for the book will range from younger technologists to a general audience of anyone interested in the industrial future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think about young people in industrial settings and want to help them see they\u2019re part of a great tradition and are doing important things to change the world,\u201d Mindell says. \u201cThere is a huge audience of people who are interested in technology but find overhyped language does not match their aspirations or personal experience. I\u2019m trying to crystallize this new industrialism as a way of imagining and talking about the future.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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