Unemployment: technological causes, cures andconsequences

C.F. George, MA, CEng, MIEE

Indexing term: Engineering and society

Abstract: The statistics linking new technologyand unemployment are examined, and it is con-cluded that the direct effects of technology areoutweighed by its indirect effects, via long termeconomic cycles, whose behaviour is similar tothat of any unstable feedback system. The socialchanges associated with previous troughs in thecycle are considered, and a parallel is drawnbetween the present recession and that of the1830s, which triggered the principal social changesof the industrial revolution. The equivalent socio-economic effects of the present technological rev-olution are discussed. The impact of newtechnology on third world employment is alsoconsidered, together with the possible implicationsof global economic recovery.

1 Introduction

Despite its current downturn, unemployment in theUnited Kingdom is still a factor of six higher than it wastwo decades ago, at about three million people comparedwith about half a million in 1965 [1]. In the same twodecades the employment of computers has been rising,from a few thousand mainframes in the sixties to manymillions of microcomputers and microprocessors today.From this correlation between the growth of employmentof computers and the decline of employment of people itis tempting to conclude that computerisation is a majorcause of unemployment, if not the principal cause, butsuch a conclusion is too simplistic. The advent of thecomputer has given powerful new impetus to automation,and automation is almost by definition an eliminator ofjobs; but the computer and its allied information technol-ogies have also created totally new jobs. And with theworld's stock markets still suffering from their October1987 crash, it is abundantly obvious that automationitself is but one of many potential causes of unem-ployment.

Nonetheless, the relationship between computerisationand unemployment cannot be dismissed lightly. Micro-electronics and the other new information technologiesthat are developing around it have immense potential, asyet largely untapped, for replacing human toil by the toilof intelligent machines, and they are therefore inextrica-

Paper 5941A (M2) first received 18th December 1986, and in revisedform 21st November 1987The author is at Coombe Cottage, 71 Station Road, Delamare, North-wich, Cheshire CW8 2HZ, United Kingdom

bly linked to the problem of unemployment. Even if com-puterised automation is not the cause of today's highunemployment levels, there would seem to be little pointin applying the technology while unemployment remainsat such levels.

The engineering profession has a tendency to wash itshands of such problems, and to refer them to society atlarge. We can claim that our task is to provide the besttools possible for the creation of wealth in society, andthat society can blame only itself if it misuses the toolsthat we provide. That answer, however, is not totallyhonest. Most of us have a genuine objective to createwealth for society, but we also have an objective to createwealth for ourselves, and for most of us the second objec-tive takes priority over the first. We tend to assume just alittle too readily that because someone is prepared to payus for what we do, our efforts are of benefit to society asa whole and not just to ourselves and to those who payus. To be sure that our assumption is valid we need toexamine the social consequences of our activities objec-tively and in some depth. Only then can we have a pro-fessional conscience that is totally clear, and only thencan we effectively answer our critics, who are quick toblame all of society's ills on technology and on the per-ceived indifference of those who develop it and apply it.

2 Statistical evidence

Various attempts have been made to ascertain the actualrelationship between computer technology and jobs, byexamining the employment effects within those organis-ations in which the technology has been applied. North-cott, Fogarty and Trevor have summarised a number ofsuch studies, with the conclusion that the effects are small[2]. A study of 1200 factories carried out by the PolicyStudies Institute [3] revealed that over two thirds ofthose using microelectronics saw no change in theiremployment as a result, and that where there was achange it was usually small, and often a gain rather thana loss. The net result was a loss of about 34000 jobs overthe two year period from 1981 to 1983, which was reck-oned to be less than five per cent of the loss of jobs inmanufacturing from other causes. For the economy as awhole, including the service sector, Northcott et al. quotecalculations that the net effect of using new technologyhas actually been a small gain in employment.

Redundant print workers who spent the winter of1986/1987 demonstrating outside Times Newspapers'automated print works at Wapping might find it difficultto accept those conclusions, but in the words of North-cott et al. such 'exceptions ... look more impressive in

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headlines than in analysis'. The argument that computertechnology has created as many jobs as it has eliminatedis further substantiated by international employment sta-tistics. Those countries which have applied computertechnology most vigorously, notably Japan, tend to havethe highest levels of employment. Between the mid-1960sand the beginning of the 1980s, when Britain's unem-ployment was climbing from 1.8% to 11.3%, Japan'sonly rose from 1.4% to 2.2% [4].

This type of analysis lends powerful support to theassertion that 'the facts do not support any causalrelationship between automation, higher productivityand unemployment' [5], but can be misleading. Thosenations and organisations which have applied computertechnology most vigorously have in general maintainedhigh employment within themselves, but this may wellhave been at the expense of employment elsewhere. Whena company closes because it has become inefficient it isactually closing because its competitors have becomemore efficient, usually by adopting new technology. Nostatistics can tell us whether all competitors could haveremained viable, without shedding labour, if all hadadopted the same new technology; but the chances arethat they could not.

3 Underlying causes of unemployment

3.1 Economic decline: relative and absoluteStudies such as those reported by Northcott et al. suggestthat present unemployment is owing not so much to theintroduction of new technology as to other causes, prin-cipally Britain's relative economic decline and the globaleconomic recession. Two observations can be made onthis. The first is that relative decline is not necessarily abad thing in itself (we often express the wish that thethird world should catch up with us economically), and isonly likely to lead to unemployment when global recess-ion turns it into something approaching absolute decline.During the 1960s unemployment was under 2%, and wewere content that we had never had it so good, despitethe fact that our economic decline relative to Japan wasquite considerable, at 5.6% per annum [6]. Between 1974and 1982 our relative decline had been trimmed to only1.8% per annum, but because the whole world hadslumped our meagre overall growth rate of 1.6% was lowenough to put some parts of our economy into absolutedecline, so that unemployment rose sharply. The secondobservation is that, just as Britain's relative decline islargely due to the introduction of new technology inother countries, the global recession is arguably due tothe introduction of new technology worldwide.

3.2 The Kondratiev economic cycleThe causes of major economic depressions and recessionshave been the subject of considerable recent investiga-tion, for example by the Science Policy Research Unit(SPRU) at Sussex University [7], from which a powerfulargument has emerged linking long term economic cyclesto the development of new technology. These long termcycles, with a periodicity of approximately fifty years,were first observed by the Russian economist Kondratievin the 1920s, when the world economy was slidingtowards the stock market crash of 1929 and the depres-sion of the 1930s. The stock market crash of 1987 neednot be the precursor of an equally severe depression, butit is a salutary reminder that economic growth is still acyclic phenomenon.

Kondratiev observed that booms and slumps hadtaken place on a fifty year cycle since the beginning of theindustrial revolution, and identified them with the lifecycle of major infrastructural investments such as rail-ways. Since then, however, the importance of the intro-duction of new technology, as opposed to the renewal ofold technology, has been recognised. It now seems highlyprobable, as argued by Clark, Freeman and Soete atSPRU, that each cycle of about thirty years' growth, fol-lowed by a major recession or depression, has beenclosely associated with the introduction of significanttechnical innovations. The first observable cycle corre-sponded to the first phase of the industrial revolution,with the mechanisation of the textile industry, the build-ing of the canals, and the introduction of the steamengine; the second cycle was based on railways and thesteel industry; the third on oil, petrochemicals, electricityand the internal combustion engine; and the fourth cycle,which began in the 1940s and passed its high point in theearly 1970s, has been associated with air transport, tele-communications and electronics, of which the computerhas been a major part.

Since each cycle has been associated with more thanone major new technology, and since several of the tech-nologies have continued their growth in subsequentcycles, the phenomenon cannot be explained purely bythe expansion and saturation which occurs following theintroduction of major innovations. Although new tech-nology is almost certainly the driving force behind thegrowth phase of each cycle, the cyclic nature of thegrowth, with the various technologies tending to move inphase with each other, appears to be a function of theeconomy itself.

No complete explanation of the phenomenon has yetfound general acceptance, but there is a marked simi-larity between this cyclic economic behaviour and thebehaviour of any unstable feedback system, such as asimple amplifier with a time delay in its feedbacknetwork. In this case the input to the system is invest-ment in new technology, and the outputs are productivecapacity, market prices, and profit margins, the last ofwhich is fed back to control the level of investment at theinput. The availability of new technology increasesmargins at existing prices and therefore encouragesinvestment, but as capacity rises prices and hencemargins fall, discouraging further investment. However,because there is a time lag between investment decisionsand the resulting increase in capacity, the system is liableto overshoot and go into oscillation, with a period deter-mined by the time constant of the feedback network. Ifthe various technologies being introduced at any onetime were independent of each other, their separate partsof the economy might oscillate independently, butbecause they are not independent they tend to lock them-selves into phase with each other, and the entire economyoscillates at a periodicity determined by the average timeconstant of the various investments. Taking a feedbackamplifier such as a Wien bridge oscillator as a model, wecan expect a cycle time of 2n times the feedback timeconstant, so that the observed cycle time of fifty yearscorresponds to a time constant of eight years, which isreasonably typical of the gestation time of major invest-ments using new technology.

This inherently unstable economic feedback system issubjected to some degree of stabilisation approximatingto feedforward control, in that investment decisionmakers do sometimes make allowances for market priceshaving fallen by the time their new capacity comes on

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stream. However, they tend not to make sufficient allow-ance, because decisions looking five to ten years aheadtend to be made on the assumption that demand willcontinue to grow at much the same rate as in the pre-vious five to ten years, which is not necessarily the case.

A second and more fundamental reason why invest-ment decision makers do not damp out the oscillations isthat it is often not in their interest to do so. The efficiencyof new technology does not remain static during anycycle, but continues to increase throughout it, so thatcompanies must continually leapfrog each other with thelatest technology in order to stay in business. A companywhich has just been leapfrogged by its competitors haslittle option but to make another jump itself, even if thenew capacity that it generates by doing so is more thanwill be required by the time it comes on stream. Further-more, the companies that create the overcapacity at theend of the growth phase are the ones that are most likelyto survive the subsequent slump, since they are the onesthat will have the most efficient technology. Individualcompanies therefore have a strong incentive to drive thesystem into oscillation rather than to stabilise it, and atnational level governments have little option but tosupport them for similar reasons. Those nations whichinvest most heavily in new technology towards the end ofthe boom are the ones that do most to create the sub-sequent slump, but those which invest least are the oneswhich suffer from it. National economic action to avoidglobal recession may be in the global interest but it is notin the national interest, so that even if such action ispracticable no government can afford to take it, and thelong term cycle of boom and slump continues, with everincreasing technical efficiency driving the integratedworld economy into new investment and new profits,over-investment, over-capacity and falling profits, andhence to financial crisis, capacity shedding and unem-ployment.

3.3 Technology and social changeAs well as creating unemployment via the economicsystem, it is possible that new technology also createssuch social effects directly, since major technical innova-tions may be incompatible with the social and institu-tional framework into which they are introduced.Freeman has quoted arguments that the technologicallydriven need for institutional or social restructuring isindeed the root cause of the Kondratiev cycle [8], butwhether or not this is the case such restructuring has his-torically phased itself in with the economic cycle, asmight be expected on purely economic grounds. During agrowth phase, production increases in line with pro-ductivity, so that employment stays fairly constant afterits initial post-depression rise and the social structureremains stable. Only when the cycle enters its overshootphase, in which new capacity continues to come onstream despite a slackening or even a fall in demand, dothe effects of increased productivity come through asunemployment or other forms of social distress. A partic-ularly striking example of capacity overshoot occurred inthe steel industry at the end of the last growth phase,when between 1973 and 1975 total production capacityin the OECD countries grew by 7%, despite a fall indemand and output of 16% [4]. It is only when this sortof overcapacity builds up, leading to a major industrialshake out, that the institutional and social frameworkneeds to adapt itself to the new technologicalenvironment; so that the ensuing depression or recessionbrings with it a period of social change. The greater the

technical advances in efficiency and productivity thathave taken place in the growth phase, the greater is thesocial upheaval that can be expected to follow.

4 Economic recovery

4.1 OverviewFrom the foregoing discussion it would appear that twothings need to happen during a recession or a depressionbefore economic growth can begin again. First, pro-ductive overcapacity has to work its way out of thesystem, which means in essence that businesses must gobankrupt, or at least come close enough to it to be forcedto dispose of a large proportion of their assets and theirworkforces; and secondly society must reorganise itself toaccommodate whatever structural changes may havebeen necessitated by new productive technology. The firstof those two requirements takes place naturally withinthe economic system, and can be accelerated, as hap-pened during the first half of the 1980s, by the applica-tion of monetarist economic principles. Once theovercapacity has gone, economic recovery can then beaccelerated by a switch from monetarist principles toKeynesian principles, as happened in the 1940s and1950s; however, purely economic measures may not ofthemselves satisfy the second requirement, the need forsocial restructuring.

4.2 Historical experience: the industrial revolutionBefore we can attempt to define what kind of socialrestructuring might be necessary in the 1990s, we need toconsider the changes which took place following thethree previous Kondratiev recessions of the 1830s, 1880sand 1930s. As described for example by Hobsbawm [9],significant changes took place following each of thosetroughs, but the changes which followed the first were byfar the most dramatic and from the social point of viewwere what made the industrial revolution a revolution.Technically and economically the industrial revolutionstarted early in the eighteenth century and was not com-plete until around the end of the nineteenth, but thechanges which revolutionised society and created J.K.Galbraith's 'affluent society' in place of poverty anddrudgery took place in the two or three decades that fol-lowed the trough of the 1830s. Now that we are in thefirst trough of what we have begun to call the computerrevolution, it is reasonable to anticipate another socialrevolution of equivalent magnitude; and also to postulatethat economic growth will not begin again in earnest,and that unemployment will not decline significantly,until that social revolution has at least begun.

Professor Harold Rosenbrock has argued that thecomputer revolution is not worthy of the name revol-ution in this sense, and is no more than a continuation ofthe industrial revolution itself [10]. That view is rein-forced by Krishan Kumar's observation that the 'serviceeconomy' which appears to be emerging in parallel withcomputerisation is not a new phenomenon at all, but onewhich began as part of the industrial revolution [11].Whereas industrialisation reduced the agricultural work-force from a majority of the working population to a tinyminority, it never itself replaced many more than half ofthe agricultural jobs lost, leaving the other half to appearin the service sector. If computerisation were in duecourse to increase the service sector to ninety per cent ormore of the working population it would still be no morethan an extension of the original revolution. However,the growth of service employment was more an effect

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than a cause of the revolution which created the affluentsociety, while the growth of manufacturing employmentplayed a much more fundamental role, and its decline istherefore likely to be equally fundamental.

In the 1830s and 1840s, when the industrial revolutionhad reached much the same stage as the computer revol-ution has reached today, few people other than inventorsand entrepreneurs had benefitted from it, and many hadsuffered. Hobsbawm has described the period as one ofhopelessness and hunger, one which brought not onlyLuddite machine wrecking but Chartism and Marxism,the Poor Law and the workhouse, and which brought theBritish people closer to violent revolution than at anytime since the 17th century [9]. The economics of indus-trialisation were still the stark economics of Smith,Ricardo and Malthus, under which the price of labourwas the price of subsistence, the lowest price that wouldkeep the labourer alive [12], but the growth that hadbeen sustained by those harsh principles had ground to ahalt. Marx predicted a social revolution precipitated bythe social distress of the workers, but instead witnessedthe beginnings of a much more productive revolution,which was in a sense precipitated by the economic dis-tress of their employers. Partly because of growing pres-sure from the nascent trade union movement, but morefrom pragmatically enlightened self interest, employersbegan to recognise that the further progress of industrial-isation depended not on the maximisation of profitsthrough the minimisation of wages, but on the positivemotivation of the industrial workforce. This recognitioncontributed strongly to the emergence of democracy, aprocess which, in Britain, began with the Reform Act of1832, and which was 'already past the point of reversi-bility by 1870' [13]. Democratisation meant that theprice to be paid for labour was no longer the price ofmere subsistence, but now included a share of the wealththat industrial labour created, so that employers andemployees benefitted alike as the second phase of indus-trialisation began, and the foundations were laid of thesociety we know today which, for all its ills, is immeasur-ably more egalitarian, more democratic, and more afflu-ent than any other in the entire history of civilisation.

4.3 The computer revolution: progressive orretrogressive?

Within the revolution of the 1840s lies a warning for thepotential revolution of the 1990s. If the affluent societycame into being because industrialisation was dependenton the people it employed, who were a major proportionof the total population, then that society and its affluenceare now at the mercy of computerisation, which is depen-dent on no-one but the engineers and entrepreneursresponsible for introducing it. It is quite possible that thesocial restructuring for which the second phase of com-puterisation is now waiting is the restoration of the inde-pendence of inventors and entrepreneurs, freeing themfrom the economic burden imposed by the affluence ofthe rest of the population, releasing the resourcesrequired for further investment in automation, andleaving the bulk of the population to find its place in theservice economy. Economic growth would then beginagain, but the society that emerged would be very differ-ent from the egalitarian one that we know today. Wealthwould be concentrated in the hands of the entrepreneursand engineers who control the machines that create it,while the rest of the population would return to some-thing approaching their former subservience, earningtheir subsistence not from peasant agriculture nor from

selling their industrial labour, but from selling servicelabour, and earning no more than is necessary to main-tain the level of consumption required by entrepreneursand their productive machines.

Were it not for one factor, historical experience wouldsuggest that such an outcome, far from being undulypessimistic, is the most likely one. For all but onehundred and fifty years of its ten thousand year history,civilisation has been characterised by the existence ofwealthy elites ruling a subservient majority, not alwaysexploitatively but always autocratically. Industrialisationbrought democracy, but only because its new elite wascrucially dependent on the majority for the creation of itsnew wealth. Computerisation is now removing thatshort-lived dependence, and allowing civilisation torevert to what might be considered its natural historicalform. Tomorrow's elite may be different in kind from yes-terday's, and may well include the entire engineering pro-fession, but except for the one overriding factor, it is notlikely to be any different in its behaviour towards themajority. The overriding factor, the factor which suggestsa different outcome, in which the democracy establishedduring the past one hundred and fifty years will be main-tained and perhaps enhanced, is communication. Beforethe industrial revolution it was possible for elites to seethemselves as being different from the majority, and topersuade the majority to accept the assumed difference,but communication technology, from the printing pressesthat broadcast Charles Dickens to the satellites thatbroadcast Bob Geldof, has changed that for ever. Unlessthe engineering profession dismantles its communicationtechnology it will not be allowed to practise elitism, forgood or for ill, and democracy will survive. However, itcannot survive without some form of social revolution,because the power that put democracy in place, thepower of materially productive labour, is now being dis-placed by the computer.

5 The emerging social structure

5.1 Work distributionThe core of the problem is not so much that the com-puter is eliminating human work, as that it is shiftinghuman work from those activities which create materialwealth to those which consume it. This of course is as itshould be in that by taking increasing advantage ofmachines to create material wealth we are freeing peopleto do what they are best at: converting material wealthinto what we might call human wealth. This may behealth care or social services, and can equally be the pro-vision of sports facilities, restaurants, holidays, entertain-ment and so on, but if the population as a whole is tobenefit from this increasing human wealth, it must findsome new means of controlling the material wealth onwhich it is based.

One means that has been suggested is work sharing, orto be more precise, the sharing of materially productivework. Jenkins and Sherman, for example, have suggestedthe introduction of a three day week or a three weekmonth [14], and as productive efficiency continues toincrease this would need to be followed by a two dayweek and then a one day week or a one week month. Theentire working population would spend part of its timecreating material wealth, which it would then be free toconvert into human wealth in the rest of its time.However, such proposals are unlikely to be practicable inany democratic society. Although most of us wouldwelcome a reduction in our working hours, the people

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who matter most would not. Ambitious entrepreneursand creative engineers are liable to behave entrepreneur-ially and creatively for sixteen hours a day and sevendays a week whenever the mood so takes them, nomatter what legislation is introduced to try and stopthem. Furthermore, some people are good at materiallyproductive work and others are good at socially pro-ductive work, and to make them share their work wouldnot be very productive in either respect.

5.2 Capital ownershipThe problem remains then that the majority of the popu-lation, whose work will consume material wealth ratherthan create it, will need to find something other thantheir labour through which to obtain an equitable shareof the wealth. If we take the conventional economic viewthat wealth is created by a combination of labour andcapital, it follows that once the majority is no longerinvolved via labour it will have to become involved viacapital; as production becomes less and less labour inten-sive and more and more capital intensive, the ownershipof productive capital is likely to become increasinglyimportant for an increasing proportion of the population.It does not matter in principle whether people owncapital via wider share ownership, as advocated on theright wing of politics, or via public ownership as advo-cated on the left, or via community ownership as advo-cated in the middle, but one way or another society willhave to organise itself such that everybody, directly orindirectly, owns a share of the machines on which theirlivelihood will increasingly depend.

Ward Morehouse has described proposals for widershare ownership in the USA, a 'universal stock ownershipplan', which would yield an annual income of $20 000 perannum to every American family [15]. Income earned ontop of that, from service work for example, would notneed to be very great in order to make every Americanfamily quite affluent, and to dispel the financial penaltiesof 'unemployment' without recourse to welfare payments.However, if the average citizen is to receive the bulk ofhis or her income unearned, whether as share dividends,or as welfare benefits, or via negative income tax or someform of social wage scheme, the possibility arises thatnobody will bother to do any work, of either the materi-ally productive or the socially productive variety.

The behaviour of many unemployed people today sug-gests that such a possibility is more imagined than it isreal. In those parts of the country where unemploymentis highest, many people give up looking for a job, butonly the weakest of them give up work. Some join incommunity projects, some take up gardening, and digtheir neighbours' gardens as well as their own, othersform pop groups and earn a pittance while dreaming ofearning a fortune, and others actually do earn small for-tunes in the black economy. All of this is work, and all ofit is productive; sometimes materially but mainly social-ly, and it is not very different from the type of work thatwe might hope that most people will be doing once thecomputer revolution has progressed a little further. Theonly problem with it is that it falls outside today's eco-nomic system; it goes unrecorded, it does not contributeto the Gross National Product, and worst of all, it goesuntaxed.

5.3 TaxationThis informal economy of personal service, voluntarywork, household work, and small undeclared businessesis considered by several informed commentators to be thebasis of the newly emerging social structure [16, 17]. Pro-

fessor Charles Handy, for example, suggests that we havenothing to lose and everything to gain from 'making theinevitable respectable' [18], and granting all shades of theinformal economy official recognition, but this cannothappen until the taxation problem is resolved. So long asthose of us who work in the official sector of theeconomy pay taxes on our earnings we are likely toresent those who do not, whether their income comesfrom our taxes via welfare payments, or from share own-ership, or from black market trading, or comes in kindrather than money from a variety of personal services. AsJohn Endersby has pointed out, 'economically andorganisationally we have got ourselves locked into asystem which is dominated by money' [19], when theemerging service economy requires things other thanmoney, things like personal service, gifts, and simplegratitude, as additional means of exchange. Taxation ofincome is the greatest barrier to acceptance of othermeans of exchange, and needs to be replaced by someother form of taxation before the new social structure cangain acceptance.

From a rather different analysis of the problem, PaulEkins comes to a similar conclusion [15]. Ekins arguesthat the present system, by taxing income and giving taxrelief on capital investment, promotes automation at theexpense of employment, and he concludes that 'it hasbecome an urgent priority to find ways of shifting the taxburden from labour onto the use of capital andresources'. This argument is based on the premise thatautomation is bad and should be discouraged, but wereach the same conclusion from the opposite premise thatautomation is good. If we are aiming to construct asociety in which material wealth is created by machinesrather than by large numbers of people, then that societywill have little option but to tax the machines rather thanthe people; as material production becomes more capitalintensive and less labour intensive, taxation will have tobecome more capital intensive also.

5.4 The way forwardThis view of taxation reveals another dilemma which liesat the very heart of the unemployment problem. Weobserved earlier that two things need to happen beforeeconomic growth can take off after a recession; first, afterthe overcapacity of the previous Kondratiev peak hasbeen disposed of we have to invest in the new technol-ogies of growth; and secondly, society must restructureitself to accommodate those new technologies. In respectof taxation, those two requirements are in head-on con-flict with each other; investment in new technologyrequires a low burden of taxation on capital, while socialrestructuring requires a high burden on capital. It isperhaps because of this conflict and others like it that thepresent recession and its unemployment are proving sodifficult to bring to an end.

The way forward can only be a carefully judged andcontinually adjusted balance. The tax burden on capitalcannot be increased very much until industry has reco-vered sufficiently to be able to afford it, but incentives toinvest in automation cannot be made very high untilsocial structures have reorganised themselves to accom-modate the consequences. We shall not be free to investwholeheartedly in the new computerised technology ofautomation until the people whose jobs are lost to it seethemselves as beneficiaries rather than as victims, whichwill not happen until, by a gradual process of inching ourway forward, we have evolved new forms of taxation,new forms of capital ownership, and perhaps even new

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forms of democracy, which between them will make thecomputer revolution as revolutionary as its industrialpredecessor.

6 Broader issuesSuch is the severity of present unemployment in theUnited Kingdom and other western nations that it is alltoo easy to forget the world outside our own developedworld of industrialisation and computerisation, a worldwhose unemployment problems make ours pale intoinsignificance. It is well beyond the scope of this paper toconsider the third world's problems at any length, but nodiscussion of unemployment can ignore them altogether.As we observed earlier, the introduction of new tech-nology in countries like Japan can cause unemploymentin more laggardly countries like Britain, and by the sametoken the introduction of new technology throughout thedeveloped world can cause unemployment in the lessdeveloped world. Some less developed countries in SouthEast Asia have managed to take advantage of new tech-nology, but even that may not last, as cheap onshoreautomation replaces cheap offshore labour. In examiningthe effects of automation technology throughout the lessdeveloped world, Raphael Kaplinsky observes that 'allthe portents are that as the economic crisis in theadvanced countries progresses, and as the new automa-tion technologies diffuse more widely, so LDC exportersface growing difficulties in gaining access to markets inadvanced countries', and he concludes that 'for theirpopulations, the new technology is at best irrelevant, atworst a threat to export-led growth strategies' [4].

Worse still, E. F. Schumacher has pointed out thatwhen underdeveloped countries do succeed in intro-ducing modern technology, they often create their ownunemployment by doing so. 'The establishment ofmodern industry in a few metropolitan areas tends to killoff competing types of traditional production throughoutthe countryside, thus causing widespread unemploymentand underemployment' [20]. Schumacher's answer,which is now the most widely accepted answer, is inter-mediate technology, or appropriate technology, butshould we succeed in applying it, and succeed in solvingthe Third World's unemployment problems as well asour own, we shall be faced with another problem: theproblem which Schumacher defines as consumption ofthe earth's capital [21]. At present, in the midst of eco-nomic recession, the global problem of resource depletionhas receded too; but if the whole world drives itself out ofrecession with resource consuming employment firing onall cylinders, that problem will soon return, and is likelyto bring with it yet another problem, the biggest problemof all.

As has been pointed out by Robert Beckman forexample, unemployment is only one of the social symp-toms typical of a Kondratiev trough; another is relativeinternational harmony [22]. Major wars do not occurduring slumps, when resources are plentiful and do notneed to be fought for, and when nations are busy sortingout their internal problems; they occur during the growthyears. The last growth phase started with World WarTwo and continued on through Korea and Vietnam,before slumping into relative peace in 1973. The previousgrowth phase included World War One, the one before itthe Crimean and the American Civil Wars, and the onebefore that the Napoleonic wars. During eacfr growthphase our exploitation of the earth's resources of landand minerals has grown exponentially, and the destruc-tive power of the military technology with which we

compete for those resources has grown exponentially too.Unless we are able to devise some means of adminis-tering it, the next growth phase will be fraught withdanger.

Despite the upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century,the society which emerged from the industrial revolutionwas a far better one than before, and better for the effortsof engineers. The over-enthusiastic application of newtechnology has contributed to subsequent social uphea-vals, including today's unemployment, and society willhave to restructure itself in many ways before it canbenefit fully from our current technological revolution,but the society which emerges from these few decades ofupheaval can once again be a far better one than before,and better again for the efforts of engineers. There is,however, one major proviso. In the past, society's over-enthusiasm for the benefits of technology has pushed itinto cycles of boom and slump, with attendant andincreasingly violent cycles of war and peace. During theboom of the fifties and sixties we allowed ourselves tobelieve that there could never again be a global slump,and we have also allowed ourselves to believe that therecan never again be a global war. Let the recession of1973 and the crash of 1987 be a lesson to us. As we applyour engineering ingenuity to the task of climbing out oftoday's relatively peaceful slump, let us be aware that weare climbing into the most dangerous decades in thehistory of our species, and let us apply our social ingenu-ity to the task of ensuring that we do not become victimsof our own overenthusiasm.

7 References

1 HALSEY, A.H.: 'Change in British Society' (Oxford UniversityPress, 1981)

2 NORTHCOTT, J., FOGARTY, M, and TREVOR, M.: 'Chips andJobs: acceptance of new technology at work', Policy Studies Insti-tute, 1985

3 NORTHCOTT, J., and ROGERS, P.: 'Microelectronics in britishindustry: the pattern of change', Policy Studies Institute, 1984

4 KAPLINSKY, R.: 'Automation — the technology and society'(Longman, 1984)

5 JENKIN, P.: in FORESTER, T. (Ed.): 'The information technologyrevolution' (Blackwell, 1985)

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318 IEE PROCEEDINGS, Vol. 135, Pt. A, No. 5, MAY 1988