Review: Horizon — Now The Chips are Down
Not so much a review as a retrospective social commentary
As part of the BBC’s Computer Literacy project, there’s an archive of over 150 episodes of a number of programmes charting the beginnings of what we might call the start of the Information Age. Most come from the mid 80s, and the heyday of the early home computer boom, but in the list of related programmes is an episode of Horizon from March 1978, from over 45 years ago as I write this⁰. Unusually for a programme in the Horizon strand it’s in two sections: the first as a film, narrated in the familiar tones of science documentary voiceover stalwart Paul Vaughn; the second is a half-hour in-studio discussion. I found the whole thing fascinating, for a number of reasons.
The film
After an intro that shows what now looks like a primitive and enormous eReader, and a voice-controlled wheelchair, showing the potential future uses of the then nascent technologies, we get into the meat of the first section of proceedings, which is a quick history lesson covering the evolution of the transistor, the subsequent development of early microprocessors, and the rise of Silicon Valley. It’s interesting to note that, like the Internet technologies that ran hand-in-hand with them, lots of this initial development (particularly Shockley’s use of silicon) was for military purposes. At the point this film was made (1978), the home computer boom, and the proliferation of the Intel 8008 family of chips and their relatives (like the Zilog Z80) was yet to start in earnest. This is less than a year after the release of the Apple II in the US¹, with hobbyist computing still being restricted to the specialist magazines here in the UK. Once we move from the history lesson, we get to see the process for chip fabrication as it was in the late 70s, and see the phenomenal failure rates for production of the time.
It is at this point that talk turns to impacts and applications. First, we see the experimental technology behind cochlear implantation, followed by calculators (including the first fleeting mention of Sinclair Research), the already satirised digital watch and its effects on the Swiss watch industry², and the nascent computer games market. Finally we get to an early example of digital tills/ePOS in supermarkets, and machine checking of credit cards, with the observation that, in New York, some supermarkets are (shock horror!) even actually allowing electronic payment with credit cards, before this is connected and extended to automation of warehousing, and stock control. Today of course, all of this computerised automation is so commonplace it hardly even merits a mention. However, even with the benefit of hindsight, what we know now is that people are still very much part of the process, if the state of Amazon warehousing and distribution is to be believed. And there are glimpse of the innate sexism of the time too, with discussion of the sinister overtones of monitoring of the work rate of the “checkout girls” in the supermarket. In echoes of the current Scandi fight against the rapacity of Elon Musk and his anti-union stance, there’s even a passing mention of Danish checkout staff refusing to be monitored that way. Then we move to word processing, and the death/mutation of the old-school (again female dominated) typing pool. The tone is similar in some ways to the tone of the conclusion of the final episode of James Burke’s Connections series (about which I’ve already written), which will have been in production as this aired, and was broadcast around 7 months later toward the end of the year. Clear concerns are voiced that sectors of the economy are starting to see significant employment consequences. In areas of work we’ve so far seen, these are staffed by women, even at this early stage of post-industrial development.
But it isn’t just the obvious industrial world that is automating, other skilled work such as the automotive industry, medicine, and agriculture are examined next. We move to Fiat, in Italy, showing the automated production line, soon to be immortalised in the famous “Handbuilt by Robots”, Fiat Strada advert.
There are early examples shown of medical expert systems, and what we would now, even without the complication of so-called AI³, would simply describe as a rather uncontroversial “knowledge base”. Looking at this now, the surprise shown at automating the diagnosis chains of a number of different medical conditions is itself slightly surprising, given that these are mostly decision trees based on factual data, and not even the current software applications using specifically targeted AI algorithms to find anomalies in tissue samples.
It’s here that the big question is first asked: what is this going to mean for society, and the distribution of wealth and incomes? But again, there’s an echo of the time that raises a wry eyebrow, “would the unions let it happen?” as they ask what it might mean for our competitiveness against other nations, and our industrial base. Sadly, from this viewpoint, it appears that some of the warnings here by more moderate voices against the unrestrained predations of the private sector were not heeded, and were even encouraged by what came next politically. But already there the warning signs: there are those trying to separate the issues of “generating wealth”, and the social contract. The question of for whom wealth was being generated were soon conveniently sidestepped over the next few years, and some of the problems we experience now have, at their root, decisions that were, or were not, made here.
We do see another facet, in other areas of knowedge-based work, specifcally software. UK company Logica is shown working on installing a real-time banking system for a New York bank. Only a few short years after this film, talking about the problems of real-time banking, these systems were all over the world’s financial institutions. Even then, the UK was a major software engineering centre, even before the about-to-hit home computing boom on the early 80s, and the flowering of a generation of software developers. But again, the signs of the innate sexism of the time can’t be escaped. This landscape, even the language of the narration, is overwhemingly male. And it really shouldn’t have been. It’s (a bit) better now, but still not what it should be by any stretch of the imagination. Even at this point, there are already noises being made about moving the economy away from manufacture (the silicon)⁴ to services, and what this might mean for our economy.
The conclusion of this film segment is almost apocalyptic, warning of major change coming, and a lack of awareness in government, but the weird thing is they really didn’t know the half of it. The sad truth is that at this point, government probably had some idea what was on the way, and why we were not well-equipped to deal with it for a number of reasons, but like a deer in the headlights, couldn’t work out what to do. As it turned out, the government of the day only had another 15 months or so to run, and had much more immediate problems before its end. We all know what happened next.
The discussion
The first thing to note is that, like the film that preceded it, it’s very much of its time, but a really historical document of note. Four middle-aged white men sit around in the studio chewing the fat. One of them is sitting there with a cigar, letting his smoke coil off into the air⁵. Oh, far off days! But don’t let that put you off. Very early on in the discussion it becomes clear that a lot of things have changed greatly in this format, and not all of them for the better. Allthough the particpaints are all male, the tone isn’t at all macho and adversarial. In fact, it’s positively collegial, and cooperative. There is a fair amount of agreement about the big issues. All three are acutely aware of the economic and socal pressure this new wave will bring and, as it turns out, they are depressingly prescient about some of the inequalities and problems to come, even if they nominally sit in different camps. What is interesting too is that there is a very definite acknowledgement of the change in work-life balance that will hit soon, and the need to re-evaluate working lives and career paths. But what they didn’t quite get (even allowing for the fact they knew rapid change was coming) was the pace and scale of the change of the work we would do, or indeed how many entirely new industries would spring up around all of these new technologies, as well as how differently the costs they talk about would change. Discussions of processor, memory and storage costs, for example, seem quaint now. But those are the kinds of things that are, in the (somewhat unfairly mocked) words of Donald Rumsfeld, the “unknown unknowns”.
Rightly, there was concern about jobs in old sectors disappearing, uncertainty about how change would unfold, and what government policy would do about it⁶. But what is also clear is that there is support across the board for governments to be given the specialist advice they needed to understand the scale of the changes coming, and to lay in plans to deal with the consequences, from mitigation of problems in old industries, to investing in new ones. The discussion is quite technocratic, and none of our talking heads are dismissing all of this as inherently evil. Indeed, there’s general but guarded enthusiasm for some aspects of this change, and some reasonable scepticism about the more outlandish tales of doom. But you can tell it’s the 70s. Even with the so-called captain of industry, it’s not all about the rapacious appetite of the market: there’s a concern about human costs, and wider societal impact. But, what they are all clear on at this point is that there is a significant role for the state itself to intercede and mitigate. Except, as we know now, just over a year later, thinking on the role of the state in such things, changed⁷.
What is hugely depressing is that 45 years on, certain parts of the political establishment are still mired in their definitions of people as deserving or undeserving on the basis of a work ethic and a social outlook more married to the early 19th century than this one. With more automation, more economic inactivity, and even more economic and social inequality than existed at the point this aired⁸ many of their worries are not now hypothetical, but very real, and not improving. Some of the panellists’ worst fears were not only hastened along, but positively encouraged by too many people in the years that have followed. It’s quite unsettling to watch these men sit down and predict pretty much exactly how our economy and society looks right now, even though they didn’t quite know the full impact of global connectivity, the pace of miniaturisation, and computing power that has followed, and worse yet to think too many people ignored them.
⁰ UPDATE: 27 December 2023. Completely coincidentally, it appears that this will now be on the BBC iPlayer for a bit, as it turned upon BBC4 overnight on 26 December. At least the doc part is, but not the studio discussion that followed it.
¹ June 1977, according to the Apple II Wikipedia entry.
² In almost exactly the same period as this, the first episode of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on Radio 4, on 8 March. In fact, the famous “…still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea” line appears at the start of Fit the Second, broadcast on 15 March, just 16 days before this was broadcast. Of course, though the quake was major, the Swiss watch industry didn’t die. It adapted, and so we found companies such as Swatch springing up to find new markets.
³ Don’t get me started about the AI hype bubble and the curse of the Large Language Model. I still think the best description I ever heard was that most of this was like listening to the squawking of a stochastic parrot, which does pretty much sum up the dumb probabilisitc nature of the process. It’s amazing what you can conjure with some probability theory, some linear algebra and a load of compute cycles.
⁴ Somewhat ironically, given the role that Acorn (only founded in December 1978), later ARM would play in the development of RISC chips.
⁵ The presenter, Richard Kershaw, Mick McLean — Fellow of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, Robert Clayton — Technical Director GEC, and Barrie Sherman — Director of Research for the ASTMS union. Barrie was smoking the cigar, dear reader, not the assumed bloated plutocrat from GEC!
⁶ Remember too, this is the spring before the Winter of discontent, and 14 months before the Thatcher government took office. At this point James Callaghan is still the Prime Minister. There are whole other debates about economic and social policy to be had there, outwith the scope of this discussion.
⁷ That probably had a significant input from Sir Keith Joseph, the “mad monk” as he was styled. Joseph was an admirer of Freidrich Hayek’s much less interventionist position on economic management, together with Milton Friedman’s thoughts on the money supply, and he had Thatcher’s ear in the formative years of her government. The die was cast early.
⁸ Figures about the rising disparity between the richest and poorest members of out society bear this out.
