ICT Supporting Organisations 5: Technology Replacing the Individual

In the 1980s people were afraid – very afraid. America was in the thrall of Ronald Reagan and the United Kingdom controlled by the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. There was no sign of the Iron Curtain coming down and nuclear bombs were aimed at every major city in the Western hemisphere.

Help, Here Come the Computers

Most people worried about that but generally their worries would be closer to home. Family, home and jobs were what people worried most about – just like now really! A major worry was jobs and the increasing use in the workplace of a recent interloper – the computer!

Let’s face it. Computers and robots do not get tired. They do not need sleep. They do not get bored when they do the same thing over and over again. They don’t even go on strike!

In the manufacturing industries, for examples, the production of motor vehicles was becoming mechanized. Robots took over from people in the putting together of cars. Since 1980 the amount of jobs in manufacturing in the UK has halved. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Administrators and secretaries found that they were no longer in such demand because their managers would acquire the skills that had traditionally done by them. The age of “Take a letter, Miss Jones” came to an end in that decade. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

In publishing, the old fashioned way of producing pages of a newspaper or magazine – typesetting – which took a long time to learn – were beginning to be phased out. New software packages such as PageMaker and Quark were making traditional methods look old fashioned, time consuming and expensive. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Essentially, as long as machinery (sometimes called robots) and computers cost less than employing a large number of skilled workers then businesses will make every effort to replace them with machines. Are we doomed, like George Jetson in the old cartoon series set in a possible future, The Jetsons, to sit at a disk and push one button again and again all day long?

The Humans Fight Back

As we know now, the revolution in personal computers and robotics in the 1980s was not the end of the world. However, what the work force in general discovered was that as computers evolved then they had to learn to adapt to this continual change.

A lot of people, it is true, discovered that heir skills, gained over a long period of time, were now redundant. In other words, they – and their skills – were not needed anymore. Some people never worked again. However, most people in this situation moved on and discovered new skills which could make them a living. Between 1997 and 2002 alone the amount of jobs in the UK in the technology industry doubled!

Technology has not destroyed jobs and then stood still. After all, it is human needs that push technology – and we all need to work at some point in our lives! ICT created new markets (online shopping is just one example). The whole process is called “creative destruction” by economists. In other words, when something is destroyed then something else comes along to replace it. For almost three decades that is the way the major economies of the world have operated.

ICT, then, does not really destroy jobs. It moves them around. Databases did not completely replace filing; plenty of people still do that. People still have to deliver the post. However, these things are now done in conjunction with technology, not independent of it.

What ICT does mean, though, is that any skills you have today may not be need tomorrow. This of course upsets people, but what they must do is get over it. So, you go on a course to learn something and then find in two years that it has been replaced by something else – then learn that something else!

The focus of an individual’s working life in the 21st century must be on training and then, sorry, retraining! Employers too, must understand this and so many progressive organizations now have much more active training programmes than they ever had as they have realized its importance. Of course, the greatest responsibility is on the individual.

Remember the dinosaurs? Their remains were only discovered because people developed new tools to discover them. Use your new tools to see what you can discover – or even become!

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