Padraig O’Morain: Advances in technology have accelerated inequality

Computerised cars provide, I think, as good a symbol as any of the de-skilling of men and women, but especially of men.

If, like me, you are intrigued by cars that can park themselves in tight spaces without any intervention from you, or by the prospect of driverless cars, you may be looking forward to the day when you can afford to get your hands on one of these machines.

But if you’re a man, young or old, who likes to spend his time tinkering with the engine of a car, you may instead feel a sense of loss. Such men find it disturbing that fixing one of the newer cars involves connecting it to a laptop. Instead of looking into the engine, you await instructions from the screen.

Farmers, who for many decades kept old tractors going by hook or by crook, might be intrigued by the new tractor: a stunningly expensive metropolis of software that can tell you the best way to mow a field you have just driven into.

But they know too that this tractor is beyond them if something goes wrong, and they wonder whether it’s making the human being redundant.

We have seen in recent years, for example in the financial and telecommunications sectors, that sometimes when the systems break down we don’t really know how to fix them. Fixing them presumably involves writing new and more intelligent software to do the job and that, in turn, means the whole process moves farther away from human hands.

I suppose this process began, and then accelerated, from the 1970s onwards. Gradually, labouring jobs that could be done by men without a secondary education disappeared and were taken over by technology. A ride-on mower, for example, could get the job done faster and with fewer men than before.

We neither noticed nor cared about the loss of those jobs. Those who lost out were not, and are not, media savvy and could not make their voices heard.

We were told in the 1970s by some of the more enthusiastic supporters of “new technology”, as we called it at the time, that we were about to enter a Utopian era in which all the boring work would be done by machines and in which humans would do only interesting things and could look forward to many more hours of enjoyable leisure. We all know how that worked out.

More importantly, perhaps, we entered an era of educational apartheid.

In this system, your chances of putting together a decent income without a degree are pretty bleak. And if you have a degree you had better go on to get a masters.

It used to be said that you needed a degree to work as a petrol-pump attendant. That’s no longer true: there are no petrol-pump attendants.

Inequality appears to be increasing in the US. Poverty appears to be increasing in Britain. All of these now affect people with good educations as well as those without.

Have we reached the point at which we have not only broken the social contract but we have left it in pieces on the floor? Is this going to change our relationship with society? Is it going to change how we vote, who we vote for, or even what we vote for?

And what of those men I mentioned earlier who were the big losers in an increasingly technological world?

It seems to me that those who are without education will continue to fall farther down the economic ladder.

And when nobody around you has a third-level education, or maybe even a Leaving Cert, it’s awfully hard to believe in its value.

It is still true to say that if you want to get a job, you need to get an education. But this is becoming less true as people with degrees, as I mentioned above, find it harder to get decent, secure and permanent jobs.

And that, I think, is leading us into dangerous territory. pomorain@yahoo.com Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.