Rust and Boll—Asterisk

Anthropic should learn from those cotton-picking socialists.

The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible. It could do the work of dozens of men, at a fraction of the cost. It would not be defeated by knotty situations that had foiled previous machines. It would remake society, this machine, and its inventors were intent on protecting ordinary people from their creation. Not intent enough to not create it in the first place, of course, or to stop selling it — but intent enough to urge government regulation, to weigh placing it under the control of a nonprofit foundation, to experiment with novel forms of corporate governance to ensure the machine would be put to benevolent use.<br>The inventor siblings were John and Mack Rust, and their machine picked cotton.<br>The mechanization of cotton-picking is not a particularly well-remembered stage in American agricultural history these days. Most American schoolchildren learn about Cyrus McCormick, who mechanized the grain harvest, and about Eli Whitney, who mechanized cotton deseeding (and thus dramatically increased demand for manual cotton-picking and the slaves forced to do it). They don’t learn about the Rust brothers or their many competitors in the race to automate cotton-picking. Building a machine that could reliably and cleanly pull cotton fibers off of their bolls turned out to be vastly more difficult than building a machine that could cut down a wheat field, or that could deseed handpicked cotton.<br>The Rusts unveiled their machine in 1931, a century after McCormick. At the time, the cotton harvest in the U.S. was still entirely manual, usually performed by tenant sharecroppers enduring backbreaking labor not much different than that done by the slaves who preceded them (who were often, in the case of black sharecroppers, their parents and grandparents). A utopian socialist who had himself worked as a cotton-picker in his youth, John Rust was motivated to build a tool that would liberate the millions of black and white tenant farmers from the toughest farmwork still in existence.<br>John and Mack foresaw the dawn of “a planned economy of abundance … wherein at least our credit and basic industries are socialized.” It was only a matter of time before “some form of co-operative commonwealth [supplanted] our decaying capitalist society, and it [was their] wish that this transition [would] take place with as little confusion and violence as possible.”<br>The grandiosity and social consciousness underlying the Rusts’ plans intrigued journalists. “Here are two inventors who, with extraordinary success perhaps within their reach, have resolved not to follow the familiar pattern and become multi-millionaires, but instead to have a part in a social experiment conducted for humanitarian purposes," the newspaperman Robert Kenneth Straus wrote in a 1936 profile in Harper's. "That is something new on the American scene."<br>So why have the Rusts been largely forgotten? One reason is that their utopian dreams never amounted to much. They didn’t actually create the public benefit corporation they dreamed of; they did establish a Rust Foundation, but it didn’t own the invention or pioneer a new equitable wage model. They didn’t collaborate with the government in an effort to spread the gains of automation to the poor of the South. But the more important reason is that the Rusts lost. They were not the first, or even the second, to get a highly effective cotton-picker on the market. International Harvester (McCormick’s firm, still run by his grandson) and John Deere & Co. both beat them.<br>The word that comes to mind for me, in trying to characterize the Rusts and especially John Rust, is “Amodeian.” Like Anthropic leader Dario Amodei, he was a technically gifted engineer with deep moral convictions who saw founding a company as a route to social impact. Like them, he experimented with corporate governance in an attempt to align his incentives with the public good. Like the Amodeis’, the Rusts’ was a family business.<br>As of this writing, the Amodeis are not being beaten by the International Harvesters and John Deeres of the tech world. But I think Rust’s saga can still serve as something of a cautionary tale for contemporary automators with consciences.

A few words on the fabric of our lives

Mechanizing the wheat harvest was hardly simple. McCormick built on decades of tinkering by his father Robert, and Jo Anderson, a black man enslaved by the McCormicks, and a bevy of ideas from his competitor Obed Hussey.<br>But the work behind the invention of the reaper seems almost trivial when you think about what inventing a cotton-picker required.<br>When harvesting wheat, you fell the entire plant. The hard part is felling it cleanly and keeping the harvested grain together. Harvesting cotton, on the other hand, means teasing sensitive fibers from dozens of little sacs (“bolls”) on a shrub-like plant. Any mixing of the...