LIFE IN THE 60S OFFICE

A few more tinkerings to GophHub yesterday which I couldn't resist. 
It probably does everything I need at this point, and works well as 
a search option in Dillo for quick pasting of GitHub URLs. Whether 
anyone else is interested remains to be determined, so I'll try to 
resist working too much on things for other people like me who 
might, once again, turn out to be entirely imaginary.

On the other hand I've been looking back once again to simpler 
times, when the internet didn't even exist to have services taken 
away from its Javascript-less users. My latest documentary 
discovery is the 1960s british series "Look at Life", which 
replaced the newsreel footage shown before films in the cinema 
because by then television had taken over as the eyes of the 
newsman. Documentary crews travelled around for years shooting 
hundreds of ten-minute pieces (unfortunately not nearly so many 
seem to have made it to the internet) looking simply at life in the 
UK and abroad. Covering general topics like travel destinations to 
more specific things like touring factories and, in this case, what 
goes on in the new high-rise offices of Shell in London.

Of course if anyone's going to have money to splash on all the 
latest tech, it would be an oil company, and Shell had been busy 
turning their liquid gold into all the latest of 1960s technology. 
A portion of the "Look at Life" film "Rising to high office"*, from 
1963, shows a selection of these modern mechanical office marvels, 
and they're indeed all very 1960s-snazzy. But besides the big 
spinning tape drives attended to by a team of the workers in the 
computer room, most of this technology is actually incredibly 
backward-looking to todays eyes. It is full of elegant solutions to 
the specific jobs at hand, but in most cases those jobs have been 
partly or entirely replaced by the modern version of that big 
computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zUQD1p9bXY

We see a system for typists to receive recordings of dictations for 
them to enter on typewriters, clearly for a result that would now 
be expected of the man dicating and the word procesor on his PC. We 
see a mail sorting room using human sorters, but a pneumatic mail 
transport systems to deliver letters all over the building, then a 
conveyor system to squirt new ones back out. Stamps from all over 
the world are collected to be raffled off as collectables for the 
the more nerdy of the Shell workforce. Now of course most of these 
letters would be Emails instead, and surely mail processing needs 
to be much less industrial even now that machines can take over the 
sorting task too. Then we have the girls at their fully-electronic 
phone switchboards, enjoying the lack of patch leads, but perhaps 
unaware that future 'switchboards' will effectively come with the 
girls built-in as well. Even the modern air conditioning system is 
overseen by a team of dedicated warmth wranglers in their own 
control room, which would now exist only in the configuration menus 
of an automated computerised climate control system.

This might all be as expected. Anyone would expect computers to 
have caused such a reinvention of office work since the early 1960s 
when they were just beginning to find their place. But the 
documentary is primarily about the building. A high-rise building, 
designed to pack thousands of people into the best location of the 
country for business to take place. This is a type of building 
that, albeit so new to England then that even the narration borders 
on acknowledging it as an eyesore, has since become a staple of 
every major city in the world. Yet many of those people were then 
in the rooms of typists, of switchboard operators, of mail sorters, 
and much more. So many jobs that no longer exist, and yet the 
building style designed to accomodate them has thrived. I frankly 
don't understand it.

Of course with the advent of working from home by computer, it has 
been suggested that the age of such buildings is passing. This is 
really an acknowledgement that none of those physical services that 
such buildings were designed for are needed anymore, least of all 
in the centre of a major city. The computer has replaced the office 
skyscraper entirely, and people are only now starting to realise it.

But today, with actors striking over fears they'll be replaced by 
AI, and the news filled with warnings that computers are on the 
brink of replacing a new round of human occupations, one wonders 
what did happen to all the people who used to do the office jobs 
already taken over decades ago by computers? Even in the 
entertainment industry this is hardly new - Disney used to employ 
huge numbers of artists, not just for composing the animations of 
their famous films, but filling extra frames of movement between 
those 'key frames', a job which was once truely industrial in its 
scale, now replaced by computers. The news stories claim this is 
new, but actually it's a repeat of what was heard in the 1970s from 
documentaries like the BBC's 1978 Horizon episode "Now The Chips 
are Down", which I talked about in 2022-12-10Doco_Discoveries.txt.

That film prophesied that the replacement of all these occupations 
by computers would be an economic disaster causing mass 
unemployment. Seemingly it was wrong, but I'm not entirely sure 
why. Whatever industries have been absorbing this ever increasing 
surplus workforce, they presumably do have a limit at some point. 
Maybe AI will indeed push beyond that limit and we'll all be 
ruined? Or ideally I'd hope that something like a universal basic 
income could be realised to share the reality that, thanks to 
technology, our society as a whole no longer needs to work as hard 
as it used to early last century. But I'm not very optimistic about 
that.

 - The Free Thinker


* More Look at Life episodes are listed here, although I'm yet to 
find a central place to download many of them from (it seems that 
most online were those which were released on DVD in the UK a 
decade ago):
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/135875-look-at-life/seasons