Credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty
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The other day, one of my nieces remarked that she’d seen a “really old film”. Was it a silent movie? No. Was it black and white? Not that either. What betrayed its age was a background detail: the presence of a non-flat screen TV.
It’s really not that long ago that the cathode ray tube was a part of everyday life – the vital component in the heavy, box-like TV screens and computer monitors sat in our living rooms and offices.
As far back as the early 1980s, I remember people speculating that flat screens were “five-to-ten years away”. The joke was that they always would be. But then, suddenly, they arrived – displacing CRT screens just about everywhere.
The thing is that just prior to this revolution, the old technology was never more ubiquitous – thanks to multiple TVs in many homes and computerisation in the workplace.
That’s a pattern worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the puzzling phenomenon of (nearly) full employment in the contemporary capitalist economy. It may be that our robot replacements are lurking, flat screen style, just around the corner. In five-to-ten years we human beings may find ourselves joining those cathode ray tubes on the rubbish heap of history.
But, so far, there’s little sign it. That’s puzzling because even if technologies like advanced robotics and AI aren’t quite in full swing, other potentially job-destroying factors – such as globalisation – certainly are. Furthermore, we’re only ten years on from the calamity of the global financial crisis – and still propping up a low-growth economy with piles of debt, QE and ultra-low interest rates.
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