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EVERY SO often an invention takes place that transforms people’s working lives completely. Such was the invention of the spinning jenny, the steam engine, electric generation, the internal combustion engine. Today a new technology is entering industry which is going to have as great an impact as each of these before.
The decisive questions for millions of people in the next few years are going to be: What is the new technology going to be used for? Who will control it?
At the heart of the new technology is a device no bigger than a postage stamp – the microprocessor, based upon the silicon ‘chip’. It is this which is enabling scientists to build machines that read to the deaf, that translate written sentences from one language to another, that steer vehicles using spoken commands instead of a steering wheel, that replaces workers by robots on assembly lines.
The chip is a miniature electric circuit, containing thousands of components, etched on to a small wafer of silicon crystal. Its importance lies in that it enables computers to be built that are immensely cheaper and which take up a minute amount of the space of those of 20 years ago.
A computer that used to fill a set of rooms can now be fitted into a small briefcase. Computers that used to cost tens of thousands of pounds can now be built for a few hundred pounds: the cost of one unit of computer ‘memory’ has fallen a thousandfold since 1970.
The best known application of the chip so far has been in the electronic calculator and the electronic watch. Remember how these devices used to market at more than £40 a time just five years ago; now they are as cheap as a fiver.
Well, the same technology is going to be applied over the whole range of industry in the next few years. New devices based upon the chip – like the Word Processor, the Visual Display Terminal, the Viewdata Adaptor to a television, the Robot Welder – are already beginning to trickle into the offices and factories. The trickle will soon become a flood. In two or three ye’ars the word processor and the visual display unit will be nearly as familiar a sight as the electronic calculator and the quartz watch. A recent survey by the business research organisation PACTEL suggested that by 1986 the European market for microprocessors will be worth £800m – that’s more than ten times greater than it was in 1977. (Quoted in Financial Times, 24 Nov. 78.)
These devices are going to revolutionise work as we know it. The decisive question for all of us is: how are they going to revolutionise it?
They could do away with toil and tedium of much work for ever. They could produce a society in which mining accidents only ‘maimed’ robot miners; in which clerical workers turned into the office for only a couple of hours a day and engaged in leisure pursuits while machines did the rest; in which shiftwork was unknown except for a very narrow range of occupations like nursing and firefighting; in which the tedium of the assembly line was a nightmare from the past; in which even the handicaps associated with natural afflictions like deafness and blindness were overcome.
There is a hoary old argument that ‘in any society someone has to do the nasty jobs’. The microprocessor raises the very real possibility of a society in which robots would do all the nasty jobs. And that is not all. The vast range of communications technology that is becoming available could provide a ready means by which those whose labour produces the wealth could democratically adjudge how it should be used, with the information about what different alternatives would mean literally at their finger tips.
The final death blow would be dealt to the claim that somehow human beings are intrinsically incapable of obtaining the information needed to make rational decisions as to how to use resources to satisfy their material needs.
A few years ago people used to dream about what could be done with computers. But we were always told that these dreams could not come true because the cost and complexity of computers was too great. The microprocessor is rapidly destroying that argument. It is making possible the translation into reality of the age-old desire for a society from which toil has been banished and in which human beings control their own destinies.
But – and this is the big but – all these possibilities are developing in a society which cannot take advantage of them. Instead of creating new hope, the microprocessor is creating new fears of mass unemployment.
‘We are probably contemplating levels of unemployment of 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the workforce ... Such a level is roughly the peak of the 1930s depression.’ (Quoted in Financial Times, 13 Nov. 78.)
This prediction of the effect of microprocessors on jobs comes from a secret report prepared for the government. Its authors are Ray Cunow of the Science Policy Research Unit and Professor Iann Barren of Westfield College London. Professor Barren is a founder of INMOS, the NEB-backed microprocessor firm.
It is not the most alarming of the predictions that have been made. Its figures are fairly conservative compared with those suggested by some other experts.
It seems that those who control industry and the state at present are unwilling and unable to use the microprocessor to advance human happiness and liberation.
Just as the great advances in the physical sciences in the first half of this century were transformed into the murderous weaponry that gave the world Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so the microprocessor is being transformed into the means for destroying millions of people’s jobs and making the rest even more tedious and dehumanised than before.
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Last updated on 7 March 2010