Are colonising more and more occupations. At first they dealt only with scientific data, then big-scale data, then words and then small accounts.
In 1979 the first visual display terminals came to The Canberra Times. Within a short time computers killed off one profession and colonised another. There are now virtually no typesetters and no typing pools. That occupation is killed off, and another occupation, the journalists who create the words, are colonised. Much the same thing has happened in accounting. Once there were those who repetitively keyed in figures and on the other hand those who manipulated and interpreted those figures. Now those two groups have been fused. Those who solely practised the repetitive task have been killed off (occupationally) and the rest have been colonised.
Lawyers firms, too, are being taken. Government departments have succumbed, though more slowly. And nearly all of academia has been colonised by the beige boxes. Many meetings have been replaced by electronic mail.
Much of basic graphic arts has been taken, too, and more recently parts of engineering, design, geology and surveying.
A few recalcitrants use pen and paper for some things, but these are slowly being mopped up or retiring to be replaced by those already colonised by the computer. Just think of your friends and acquaintances over the past 10 years or so, and think how many now work in front of a video screen.
So what is happening overall? The common thread is that computers are isolating intellectual effort. The computers are doing the mundane and repetitive and leaving humans to do the purely intellectual.
The process is not complete. Some computers still leave some repetitive tasks to humans, but the trend is that computers slowly take the mundane tasks and never give them back.
Examples abound: indexing; mass calculations; spell checking; retaining design drawings so only the new bit has to be added without having to redo the lot, and so on.
Soon voice transcription will replace the steno-sec.
So people receive something on a computer and add only their intellectual bit (interpreting, manipulation, extracting, comparing or editing) before passing it on. Or they start with nothing and add their intellectual bit before passing it on.
This is fine for the intellectual elite. They are freed from the dross. However, it is unfortunate for the dross. They are isolated from the intellectual tasks.
This trend comes on top of continuing mechanisation of the manual occupations over the past 150 years.
In Aldous Huxley’s üBrave New World, test-tube babies were created to do the repetitive and manual work. They were called the Epsilon Minors. Moreover, they were programmed to enjoy it. This freed the Alpha Pluses to get on with running the world.
It appears that computers are our Epsilon Minors. The trouble is that we also have many natural-born human Epsilon Minors who now have nowhere to go and who have not been programmed to enjoy their alienation.
I don’t think the computerisation effect is universal or even embraces a very large section of our workforce, but it is a very significant section.
Aside from the alienated, there are other developments to think about.
As the intellectual input gets more isolated, the people engaging in it can do their work in greater isolation. That means from home _ not all of the time, but at least some of the time. This will be more widespread as computer links over the phone line get easier to use, quicker and cheaper.
On one hand, some of the ideas generated by people gathering together in offices will be lost. On the other, groups of office whingers and time-wasters will no longer meet.
Huge office buildings to store people and paper will be in less demand. And at the very time governments are encouraging higher density and in-fill, people working at home will want more space, more garden and more close-by recreation.
The supermarket, service station and newsagent of the suburban shops of old are being centralised to 24-hour locations. And the recreation centres, restaurants, pubs and clubs of the old-style town centres should move to the suburbs
No doubt these things will happen slowly and almost imperceptibly. The typing pool did not disappear overnight _ but it is no longer there.