Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Where the Chips May Fall between the First and Third Worlds' 17k
In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was involved with others people in the radical science movement in the intensive study of the implications of new technologies for the labour process. This essay is an attempt to make clear for a popular audience what microelectronics was likely to mean in both the First and Third Worlds: less jobs and more replacement of living with dead labour, leading to much greater direct control over the labour process. The Third World was likely to come off worst. I cannot recall why I wrote it or whether it was ever published, but , viewed with hindsight, it's not bad at predicting.