IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 6

credit: calle eklund/V-wolf/wikiMedia

burning sensation on his body. It
took him about four years to develop a respiratory issue, which I still
believe was as a result of mixing
200-kg drums with "dust," as dad sonamed it. The worst part was raising
backbreaking amounts off a forklift,
and pouring the contents down the
shaft by hand. A flimsy paper mask
was supplied to "protect" him from
the puff of cloud that would rise to
fog up his glasses... he would say to
me: "it feels just like acid."
Do I like machines that can
make these kinds of jobs obsolete? Without a doubt! I don't mind
change. I built and bet my career on
it. But whereas once we were speaking of a right angle turn during the
dot.com bubble, I am challenged
by what to call this new phase we
are in presently [4]. It sort of defies
spatial connotation. Christensen's
[5] "disruptive" doesn't cut it for me
anymore, and Kurzweil's [6] "singularity" is rather apocalyptic for my
liking, although this might well be
where we are being led.

FIguRE 1. A self-service pump for diesel fuel. To the right, a credit card payment
terminal. At a Preem Petrol station in Avesta, Dalarna, Sweden.

each other as they made their way
down the "slippery dip" in rows of
eight, and that the whole place
was well lit up at all hours of the
day and night. In 1991, dad was
made redundant, when the factory
moved out of inner Sydney, and my
father's job was taken over by industrial machines. At the same time I
was learning to write in LOGO [2]
and watch a Turtle on my screen go
"turnLeft(90)" and "forward(length),"
all the while making lucid connections about how this would change
the face of manufacturing. I imagined that the Turtle was real, and
instead of just drawing shapes on a
screen based on my commands, I
would be able to control a life-size
robotic turtle to move things in the
physical world.
Looking back, my father had
worked hard at the factory (he
would do overtime every occasion it
was offered), to give me and my siblings a good education - an education that would one day put people
like him out of work. Paradoxical.
But what else is life, if not about the
essence of change. Keats put this
so well in his odes, but especially in
Ode on a Grecian Urn. The reader

is confronted by a series of "opposites" and a struggle between the
human and changeable versus the
immortal and permanent [3]. Dad
would often say, "I am working hard
with my body, so you don't have to
labor physically, and have a choice
about your career, without the need
to work in a factory."
My family was not unhappy when
my father was made redundant.
He got a nice bonus for being so
loyal for so many years. He stopped
having migraines. And I was glad
that he would not come home with
pieces of glass in his tough hands.
That was, until working at his next
workplace, one of Australia's largest
food-maker groups, meant that he
was mixing additives daily to create
MSG, chicken booster, pepper steak,
and the like. At 55 years of age, limited English, no qualifications, four
kids to feed, and a home loan hanging over your head, you take what
work you can get.
If ever there was a need for
mechatronics, it was in that "spices" company. The red hot capsicum
powder would take days to scrub
off my father's forearms and hands,
and he often described an ongoing
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Business intelligence data is now
pointing to the fact that 47% of all
jobs will be automated by 2034 [7].
We can all see this change occurring. Banks, for instance, continue to decrease the number of
physical branches, as clerks have
been replaced by automatic teller
machines and online self-service
portals [8]. It's happening fast, but
perhaps so fast, that it's a blind
spot. I don't doubt that a plethora of
new jobs will be created as a result.
Change brings on more change. And
a lot of this change crept in with
the rise of eBusiness around 2001.
And yet, "self-service" shouldn't be
such a foreign concept to us. I still
remember getting petrol poured in
the car each week by an attendant
at the service station in the early to
mid-1980s [9]. And then there was a
rapid period of change, which meant
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june 2016

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016