How the 18th-century Panopticon inspired today’s giant distribution hubs
The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.
