Number of words: 376

After more than fifty years of service, the fire horse had lost its job. It was a story about changing technology and its impact on work. Fire horses themselves had previously replaced men in pulling fire engines. Volunteer teams of men and boys had originally pulled these fire engines, but in 1832, when the New York fire department’s force was depleted by the city’s cholera epidemic, horsepower came to the rescue. “Not enough men . . . could be mustered to drag the engine to the scene of the conflagration.” Necessity, being the mother of invention, forced the FDNY to spend a hefty sum of $864 to purchase a fleet of horses to replace the sick and dying firemen.

It wasn’t until the 1860s that manpower was officially swapped out for horsepower in firehouses. But the transition wasn’t easy. One obstacle was the fire fighters’ pride in their work as haulers. In 1887, Abraham Purdy, known at the time as one of the oldest living firemen, said the introduction of horses had created so many squabbles within the fire department that members resigned.

But nothing could stem the tide of progress. Continuing advancements in equipment, including quick-hitch horse collars, eventually allowed horses to relieve volunteers of their duties hauling hoses by hand. By 1869, well-trained horses and men could exit a firehouse in less than a minute. In the twentieth century, however, horses met the same fate in pulling a fire wagon as people had the century before: They were replaced in their jobs. This time, the replacement was a machine powered by a combustion engine.

This represented a small slice of a large economic pie. The technological changes of almost three centuries have repeatedly altered the nature of work and indisputably raised standards of living overall. But the unavoidable truth is that there have always been winners and losers. Sometimes these winners or losers are individuals and families. Often, they are communities, states, and even countries.

Today, the world understandably eyes artificial intelligence with a similar mixture of hope and anxiety. Will computers do to us what machines did to horses? To what extent are our jobs at risk?

Excerpted from pages 232 to 233 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne