Generative artificial intelligence has become widely accepted as a tool that increases productivity. Yet the technology is far from mature. Large language models advance rapidly from one generation to the next, and experts can only speculate how AI will affect the workforce and peoples’ daily lives.
As a materials scientist, I am interested in how materials and the technologies that derive from them affect society. AI is one example of a technology driving global change – particularly through its demand for materials and rare minerals.
But before AI evolved to its current level, two other technologies exemplified the process created by the demand for specialized materials: cars and smartphones.
Often, the mass adoption of a new invention changes human behavior, which leads to new technologies and infrastructures reliant upon the invention. In turn, these new technologies and infrastructures require new or improved materials – and these often contain critical minerals: those minerals that are both essential to the technology and strain the supply chain.
The unequal distribution of these minerals gives leverage to the nations that produce them. The resulting power shifts strain geopolitical relations and drive the search for new mineral sources. New technology nurtures the mining industry.
The car and the development of suburbs
At the beginning of the 20th century, only 5 out of 1,000 people owned a car, with annual production around a few thousand. Workers commuted on foot or by tram. Within a two-mile radius, many people had all they needed: from groceries to hardware, from school to church, and from shoemakers to doctors.
Then in 1913, Henry Ford transformed the industry by inventing the assembly line. Now, a middle class family could afford a car: Mass production cut the price of the Model T from US$850 in 1908 to $360 in 1916. While the Great Depression dampened the broad adoption of the car, sales began to increase again after the end of World War II.
Henry Ford at wheel, with John Burroughs and Thomas Edison in back seat of a Model T.
Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images
With cars came more mobility, and many people moved farther away from work. In the 1940s and 1950s, a powerful highway lobby that included oil, automobile and construction interests promoted federal highway and transportation policies, which increased automobile dependence. These policies helped change the landscape: Houses were spaced farther apart, and located farther away from the urban centers where many people worked. By the 1960s, two-thirds of American workers commuted by car, and the average commute had increased to 10 miles.
Public policy and investment favored suburbs, which meant less investment in city centers. The resulting decay made living in downtown areas of many cities undesirable and triggered urban renewal projects.
