How 1970s Britain Feared the Microchip Would Change Working Life (1978)

[@Diamonddavej]

Back in the late 1990s, my geology department had a computer from 1976 that included one of the first colour monitors in Ireland. It was a Compucolor 8001. It connected to a minicomputer, the size of a washing machine, the box contained about 6 printed circuit boards about 1.5 x 1 foot covered in lots of rectangular black chips. The memory boards boards held 16 kilobytes of memory each. The laboratory technician showed me how it operated, that it was connected to the XRF machine, and could not only tell you the elements in a sample but their abundance with surprising accuracy. He was very proud of the machine.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

Manchester University was the same mid 80s. It took about 5 minutes ot compile a 100 line program. This was a giant rusty mainframe.

[@DeannaAllison]

After watching this report, every worker in the late 70s could relax and look forward to a bright future with a 10 hour working week.

[@nickrushton2506]

This and similar reports came out about the time I did my A-levels. At an award ceremony, the headmaster gave a speech about the impact of ‘silicone chips’. He referred to ‘silicone chips’ maybe two dozen times, oblivious to his error. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip and he’d been thinking of something different…

[@user-rc4qh3lp7h]

It smacks of the same conversation being had about AI today.

[@electron8262]

Yes it's almost analogous. I think the real change will come omce computers develop sentience.

[@Nick-io9uk]

Nearly 50 years later and i've still not seen a self driving tractor. Contrary to popular belief, human labour is still incredibly cheap, even at western pay rates. So much so that in the UK automatic car washes that were common in the 1990s have almost entirely vanished and been replaced by gangs of men with sponges and leathers. Specifically immigration from poor countries of people with low wage demands has meant a lot of jobs we would have expected to be automated have not been as its simply cheaper to pay people.

[@user-rc4qh3lp7h]

@@Nick-io9uk I think many of these car washes are used to launder money similar to nail salons in the UK. But you are right humanity always finds a way to keep people busy and working.

[@Nick-io9uk]

@@user-rc4qh3lp7h Absolutely. And I dont know to what extent they would be viable without the extensive system of working tax credits that has been developed over the last 25 years....a vast subsidy to low wage employers in otherwise unfillable jobs. How many could afford to work in Tesco in south east England on £12ph without housing benefit & tax credits? Its not a true living wage. Given the popularity of onlyfans, we may see the 'oldest profession on earth' eventually become the 'last profession on earth' !

[@srpacific]

No amount of microprocessors or robots was enough to save British Leyland 😂

[@drjamespotter]

I have worked in manufacturing automation for over 30 years and it has taught me to expect that whatever job I do, it will become obsolete in 5-10 years and be ready to jump to something else. I rolled my eyes this week when I read an email from my old school about holiday placements and one pupil wanted one in recruitment. AI is already decimating this.

[@andersonklein3587]

And it came to pass, the 1970s saw the beginning of the death of the old middle class of skilled workers. It's a shame the mindsets, laws, and society haven't evolved nearly as much as the machines. 50 years from now we might be reading about how AI finished the job in our time, I hope this time society does a better job at evolving with it's tech.

[@256byteram]

Computers solved all the problems of pen and paper and in its place introduced a whole new set of problems.

[@electron8262]

All of those pen and paper people have been replaced by programmers.

[@museonfilm8919]

@@electron8262 ..........and the programmers now replaced by AI.

[@MegaCooliam]

"Women's jobs are particularly Vunerable" hahahah

[@jamesthornton9399]

Every one is loosing jobs.

[@leafyleafyleaf]

@@jamesthornton9399 Professional spellcheckers have been hit especially hard.

[@wisteela]

A great bit of history. And the Pilot ACE computer is still at the Science Museum. It would be fantastic if it was got up and running again.

[@baggierols73]

Britain & fearing new technology...now there's a novel concept 😆

[@museonfilm8919]

Yes, but to be fair Britain gave the world the ARM chip. It's used in everything today.

[@baggierols73]

@@museonfilm8919 agreed mate. Britain was at the forefront of the first 3 Industrial Revolutions. I think it's a shame that we won't be for the fourth one

[@bryn494]

Yes, it was a wonderful time in the 70s; a three day work week and major savings on the electric and petrol bills... :)

[@Hurc7495]

we dont have a 10 hour working week because too many people have been persuaded that to do so would be lazy, the result is that the 1% has become obscenely rich and a huge number of people labour in made up jobs!

[@electron8262]

I'd argue that instead of the extra money being used to emable shorter hours, it was sucked up by shareholders.

[@amigabang6157]

If labour was in more limited supply, it would be worth more. Unfortunately population growth has stagnated the market value of an individual man-hour in the UK while increasing housing prices.

[@Hurc7495]

@@amigabang6157 it could be that, or it could be that bob down the pub with 3 GCSE's and a gammy knee is quite capable of performing the work of literally hundreds of people form a century ago thanks to mechanisation and automation. This wouldn’t be an issue if we could all be grown up about it and see that there will be people with drive who can work this situation to their benefit and make a lot of money while doing so and then there’s the rest of the population who should get a cut of that in the form of a system such as universal basic income. The reality is that the billionaires on top spend a lot of money in order to buy up the media and pump out stories about the evils of benefits claimants and how it is virtuous to slave away in pointless employment for moral reasons. We live in an age of unimaginable abundance yet people still go hungry and homeless, It is not accidental!

[@Matt-od6em]

and without all this magical gubbins . . . I wouldn't be able to waste half my life watching funny cat videos. The future is ace . . . 😺

[@scroggins100]

And so it came to pass. My generation may be the last to see average jobs for average people who can expect to be able to buy a house, raise a family and have an average life. The future is not somewhere one may consider in anyway secure. Or, a happy place.

[@solsol1624]

I hope that wasn't a CMOS chip he was handling without a ground strap!

[@dooniskea]

We don't have a 10 hour working week, we have obscenely wealthy tech billionaires. This is capitalism.

[@daviddavidson2357]

Not capitalism you fool, crony capitalism. These tech billionaires are able to completely corner the market and drive out any and all free market competition because the institutions that exist to allow for free market capitalism have been bought. Even when they are held to account, the punishment is a fine and the fine is often a fraction of a percent of their annual profit, making it utterly meaningless. This is only possible if you have the government side with your company, which is not how frew-market capitalism works. I assume you think that communism is a better alternative? Who fixes the computers when all the people able to fix them have been purged or have fled for being too intelligent. See soviet brain drain for an example, of the way that AI is effectively being re-educated by the neoliberal left, causing it to perform *worse* than it did on launch.

[@drewhallewell503]

​@@daviddavidson2357Calm down and grow up.

[@dooniskea]

@@daviddavidson2357 You make assumptions and you throw insults. How tedious.

[@daviddavidson2357]

@@dooniskea You're right that I made an assumption, the part where I said "I assume" makes that fairly clear. Am I incorrect? but I throw insults? Quote it, as I said nothing about you specifically, other than that assumption.

[@pigpenpete]

@@daviddavidson2357 literally first line - "you fool"

[@backacheache]

"Hundreds... maybe thousands...,".Mr Newsreader from the past may I humbly say you have NO idea...

[@blijj3450]

And were ANY of those lil' DILs a Micro-Processor? I think not...

[@bookofdaveandsteve]

"imagine a bank full of these [ATMs]" - my brother in christ, I wish I could but they closed them all

[@mickeydodds1]

Oddly prescient and prophetic.

[@FredBloggsTheThird]

Are the chip developers still adding lots of "general gubbins" in modern integrated chips ?

[@blijj3450]

It migrated to become Bloatware 😆

[@museonfilm8919]

The biggest dilemmas we are yet to face is, what do billions of worldwide jobless people do, and how will they pay their bills? If it seems hopeless in 2024, then what will it be like in 2044?

[@Kool-AidAbstainer]

"Wimmin worst affected!"

[@edgarsxdwoo7417]

The Microcrisp

[@irishboer7124]

It's mostly come true but more jobs have been created which we couldn't have done in the 70s.

[@jamesthornton9399]

Not enough jobs.

[@museonfilm8919]

Those jobs are now being lost to AI systems. Computer Aided Design, music, art, sales assistants, shelf stackers etc. The list goes on.

[@Nick-io9uk]

I think a lot of the hysteria about no one having jobs in the 70s and 80s was due to an almost instinctive human habit of not stepping back & looking at the bigger picture, but getting bogged down in minutae. Far from being technological or political, the majority of the labour glut in those decades was baked in the cake decades prior. Virtually every country that had a baby boom from the late 40s to late 60s saw a vast increase in jobseekers 20 years later & thus unemployment in labour markets unable to absorb them. Some nations may have handed it better, or had unique circumstances (ie oil boom in Norway) but everywhere that saw an increase in births 20 years prior saw some increase in unemployment 20 years later.

[@MauroMeneguzzi-tf2jf]

🚹🇧🇷😍👍🚜

[@spidyman8853]

AI is the next stage. Will people have jobs in the future ?

[@museonfilm8919]

Someone or something will have to pay to keep all of the unemployed. Either that or we decrease the surplus population. I heard a statement somewhere that the world needs (something like) 5 million people to do the donkey-work for the wealthiest to prosper.

[@juleswombat5309]

And yet we seem to have even more civil servants with big fat pensions.

[@museonfilm8919]

AI will thin out that particular herd - it's just a question of time.

[@Nick-io9uk]

@@museonfilm8919 I imagine emigration will be more likely to do it. It already happens internally in the US...with vast numbers of taxpayers leaving the heavily populated, urban northern states for the previously rural southern ones. The former dragging around huge liabilities for their large historical populations, the latter, being rural, not having a big state, previously. Its nothing to do with 'red states' and 'blue states' as partisan yanks would have you believe, but rather the previous 50 years of population trends. In the US, authorities can and do default, giving pensions haircuts to their ex employees. Increasingly in the UK I see the productive leaving. We may not be able to do so internally like the US, but many youngsters are headed to UAE, China etc.