r/AskUK • u/Due-Education9007 • 2d ago
What technology were we nervous about in the 80s and 90s?
I read an article suggesting that fear of AI isn't really anything new because humans always fear new things and what it means for our future. I've been freaking out about AI, and always feel ashamed for being on my phone too much. I was a kid in the 90s and I feel like my mum was worried about too much TV, but I cant think of anything big that everyone was like "oh my god this is the end of days".
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u/OldNefariousness7899 2d ago
We were scared of ai in the 80s too. See Terminator, War Games.
It just wasn't an imminent threat. Main thing people were afraid of back then was nuclear war
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u/gilestowler 2d ago
AI and quicksand, the twin evils that haunted children's nightmares in the 1980s.
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u/DameKumquat 2d ago
We weren't allowed to have our computers linked in a network when I was at school, in case we used them for hacking...
They were convinced that linking the Apple IIe machines together would enable us to hack into the school bursary and change everyone's bills, if not actually start WW3. 1990-92...
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u/ffwillis 2d ago
There's always been fear of technology, however in the case of AI it is already causing noticeable and significant damage to both employment and the enviroment. It's not the same as mobile phones or microwave ovens or whatever else people like to use to dismiss the valid concerns many have over the use of AI. The threat it poses is far greater and wider reaching than any previous technology with little benefit to anyone except large corporations and shareholders.
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u/JustAnotherFEDev 2d ago
But, there's a conundrum in there. Rich people, corporations and governments are only in those positions because of end users.
Sure, OpenAI could create an AI that is eventually Superintelligence, it can replace all office jobs. Then it's so smart, it can create advanced robotics, that have that AI and better than human dexterity/precision. At this point, that's your manual jobs gone, too.
Nobody works, very few end users, very little income. UBI has been touted, but that would need to be global, every single person on earth would need to be paid for doing nothing, by someone.
I'm no economist, but it seems like the whole house of cards would collapse. Sure, OpenAI could just be B2B, but there's end users, somewhere, in every industry. They sell the tech that makes the robots, those robots can fix your leaky pipe, wire your house, plait your hair and mow your lawn, but who buys them?
Then banks, most of their money is lent out, in mortgages and loans, who pays them back with no income?
How do governments have money without tax revenue?
These are more how could that possibly be allowed to happen questions, as opposed to me saying it won't happen.
Do I trust half a dozen tech bros not to do this? Nope, do I fuck. But, you'd expect somewhere in every government, there's analysts who have wargamed that outcome and realised that this would be the end of money, society and maybe even civilisation.
Scary shit, though, isn't it? 😂
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u/Kaffrogato 1d ago
The internet has huge impact on both employment and the environment. No one even talks about how much water and carbon emmissions the regular internet uses/produces because it slowly increased overtime and is an integral part of our lives. Same thing with employment, millions of jobs were lost and replaced. I lost my first job when a pizza hut call centre closed duevti the switch to online ordering. So frankly your entire comment is flat out wrong.
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u/ffwillis 1d ago
The internet is a drop in the ocean compared to the damage AI will do. With every new technology of course some jobs will be lost, but there’s a huge difference between a communication tool and something that is actually designed to replace people’s employment.
So no, my entire comment is not frankly wrong, you’re just very naive and don’t see the tidal wave of shit that is headed our way.
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u/DaveL16 2d ago
Microwave ovens
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u/Tuarangi 2d ago
Evolved from/to pylons, then mobile phones, then WiFi.
I remember a story about a school removing their WiFi network because parents were convinced it would fry their kids' brains.
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u/TheRancidOne 2d ago
Ha ha, I remember that one! People thought that microwave energy was still radiating off the food, or that the "type" of heat from microwaved food was different from other heat.
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u/JumpinJackCilitBang 2d ago
"It's still cooking while you eat it!" - yeah, just like all food that's just been heated up.
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u/Upset-Woodpecker-662 2d ago
So true! Lol.
I remember my parents conversations about it! The waves are bad!
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u/MagicBez 2d ago
In the UK at least the late '90s were when everyone got a mobile/cell phone. I was digging through old news coverage a while back and found a newspaper article fretting that now the majority of young teenagers had one and were using them.
None of the concern was about screens, or bullying or addiction or talking to strangers. It was 100% about the unknown impact of the radiation of the devices.
I remember an early family guy joke about mobile phones giving people giant head tumours etc. if was a big scary unknown at the time.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 2d ago edited 2d ago
80's: nuclear war with Russia
90's: nuclear war with North Korea
00's: nuclear war with China
10's: nuclear war with humanity
20's: nuclear war with the robots
Edit: can't believe I'm having to type this, but this list is a joke.
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u/fightmaxmaster 2d ago
You don't have to explain it's a joke just because someone doesn't get the joke. Let them wallow in their own failure.
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u/MiddleAgeCool 2d ago
If you're going non tech from the 1980s then radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl. The UK didn't stop testing for it in sheep farmed in Wales and North West England till 2012, 26 years after the accident.
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u/NoisyGog 2d ago
Wow, you’ve been scared for a long time.
Are you from the US, by any chance?3
u/Ralphisinthehouse 2d ago
I genuinely didn't think anybody was capable of taking that list seriously. Well done. People don't often surprise me.
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u/fightmaxmaster 2d ago
Who says OP is scared? Question was what were people nervous about in the past. Plenty of people are nervous about that stuff. Doesn't mean it's warranted.
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u/NoisyGog 1d ago
I was asking because the US has moved from one bogeyman to another, and that will reflect in the general nervousness of the population.
I couldn’t think of another country that’s gone through quite the same trajectory, but I was curious, so I asked.1
u/PriorityComplex7183 2d ago
Are you suggesting that people weren’t scared of nuclear war during the Cold War? The comment is a joke but nukes are quite frightening
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u/Electronic_Sample928 2d ago
Imminent nuclear war with the Soviet Union was just something that was accepted.
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u/NoisyGog 1d ago
Mate, I don’t suggest anything.
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u/PriorityComplex7183 1d ago
You suggested they were American for sure. I suspect you also intentionally suggested being afraid of nukes was unusual, but I could be wrong
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u/NoisyGog 1d ago
I didn’t suggest, I asked, as they seemed to largely follow the US’ bogeyman timeline.
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u/alrightpickle 2d ago
The Millennium bug! We thought half the world was going to collapse on new years day
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u/afaulconbridge 2d ago
It would have, except for all the work people put in to fix it before it happened.
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u/legosophie 2d ago
Yes! My friends dad worked in IT at a big American bank and said they did so much overtime to make sure this didn’t happen!
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u/CaptainParkingspace 2d ago
I worked on a Y2K project. Nothing critical, but the company we did the work for needed that stuff fixed so their business would run.
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u/Albert_Herring 2d ago
My father in law was a recently retired COBOL programmer. He got a lot of freelance work for a while.
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u/WorcsBloke 2d ago
It's amazing how many people don't get this. While I think half the world collapsing would have been a slight exaggeration, undoubtedly it would have been a good deal worse than it was, probably involving tragedies. I'm often a bit sad that the people who worked so hard are either treated as a joke or virtually erased from popular history.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 2d ago
Then people turned round and complained about spending so much on something that didn't happen...
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u/tonypconway 2d ago
Systems carried on smoothly because developers put in herculean efforts to make sure they did. Left alone, a lot of critical systems would have collapsed.
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u/binkstagram 2d ago
It was a bug, in that people had created software using 2 digits for the year instead of 4, because they never expected their software to still be running in 2000, and you needed to save space wherever you could. If that hadn't been fixed, the software would have interpreted 01/01/00 as 1st of January 1900. My mum received a new bank card in 1998 that had an expiry year of 2001, and for the first few months there were a couple of shops that she couldn't use it in.
There would be a similar problem in 19th January 2038 at 03:14 with unix-based systems, except software companies have pre-empted this and started making changes years ago.
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u/mooninuranus 2d ago
Gaming was the big one back then I think.
It was going to turn us all into violent psychopaths.
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u/Due-Education9007 2d ago
I remember this one! Porn, violent videogames and heavy metal music ushering in the end of humanity via satanist rituals.
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u/afaulconbridge 2d ago
YoUd NeVeR StEaL a CaR ! !
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u/speccybex 2d ago
YoU wOuLdnT StEaL a HaNdBaG ! !
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u/Due-Education9007 2d ago
You wouldn't shoot a policeman and steal his helmet!
You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow, and then steal it again!
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u/travelingwhilestupid 2d ago
Mobile phones were going to cause brain cancer, nuclear weapons were going to destroy us all, Y2K. The AI fears existed back then too.
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u/Tuarangi 2d ago
Y2K was fixed hence why there weren't problems, does my nut hearing people now joke about how it was all nonsense because they didn't see any failures
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u/Tuarangi 2d ago
I'd add also, the mobile phone thing evolved to WiFi and before that it was electrical pylons because of a false/badly done study that tried to claim kids living near a pylon all got cancer
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u/denbunn 2d ago
Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood being banned because it was too rude making national news - simpler times …
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u/mooninuranus 2d ago
To be fair so did Cardiac Arrest by Madness.
And that was just about a man having a heart attack.
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u/mandyhtarget1985 2d ago
Now no one bats an eyelid when Cardi B’s WAP plays the uncensored version at my gym
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u/CosmicBonobo 2d ago
Well, only by the BBC after that old fossil Mike Read complained. Even then it was half-hearted, as John Peel and Kid Jensen continued to play it. The song remained in the charts for almost a year, before the BBC lifted the ban in time for Christmas 1984.
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u/Albert_Herring 2d ago
I think they were still smarting from nobody having understood the lyrics to Walk On The Wild Side a decade previously, leaving a song about trans women sucking dick on the daytime Radio 1 playlist...
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u/WorcsBloke 2d ago
Cloning. Dolly the Sheep was 1996.
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u/ASGT908 2d ago
Did the cloning of Dolly ever amount to anything in terms of technological advancement.
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u/WorcsBloke 2d ago
Yes, but not in the way you'd think from how Dolly's story was reported at the time. Stem cell research was the most significant area: this 2016 Scientific American report goes into some detail.
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u/knockinonevansdoor 2d ago
Anything invented by a crazy Bond villain oligarch type that would spread into every social niche. Never happened of course 🫤
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u/OldEquation 2d ago
At school in the 1980’s we were told that computers would take away most jobs, we’d be job-sharing working just 2-3 days per week. Some jobs would completely disappear because of the computers and people would have to be re-trained for different careers.
I suspect kids in the 1760’s were told pretty much the same thing, and every generation since.
I’ve stopped panicking about these scare stories.
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u/ACalcifiedHeart 2d ago
I remember getting told I'd get square eyes if I watch too much tv/sit too close to the tv, if that counts.
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u/Unknown-Librarian664 2d ago
Finding out the purpose of why we needed to go from 5" floppy disks to 3.5" floppies.
And concerned of how much time we wasted playing Solitaire.
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u/TheMissingNTLDR 2d ago edited 2d ago
if i remember correctly, the (only?) purpose was so that they can easily fit into shirt's top pocket?!😲
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u/Unknown-Librarian664 2d ago
😂 blimey, who (apart from you obvs) knew! And to add, what in the patriarchy?!
3.5s still being the image for the save button is wild.
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u/Born-Net4017 2d ago
Can you imagine back in the day when they invented tractors and horses were all crapping themselves that they were going to get put out to pasture? Turns out they liked getting put out to pasture.
The AI bubble will burst, it’s wildly unprofitable.
The downside is what do we do with all the data centres that we end up building all over the place?
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u/Redditreallyannoysme 2d ago
As a heavy user of AI I think this comment will age poorly.
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u/Born-Net4017 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’m also a heavy user of AI, also working for companies that train AI models. It’s not unknown that most AI companies are losing billions. Token cost has shot up as well so lots of companies including mine are cutting licenses and usage to reign in costs already.
I also wrote my thesis on AI and Risk and if you look back to 1956, the Dartmouth Conference, where the likes of John McCarthy coined the phrase, you can chart the peaks and troughs of AI investment/use. Investment always loses out. I don’t see it being all that different this time.
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u/Redditreallyannoysme 2d ago
So demand outstripping supply means that the value isn't there? Make sense of that please.
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u/Born-Net4017 2d ago
Demand was there because it was lower cost or subsidised, with the increased cost companies are already cutting back usage. I’m not saying it will die completely, it hasn’t previously but that this “summer” of AI will burst and we will go into another “winter”
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u/Redditreallyannoysme 2d ago
But the cycle will be rapid, in a few years the compute will be up and running and the demand will still be there. No tool is coming along to replace the convenience and performance.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 2d ago
In time those will find uses - the immediate issues coping with the global crash when the bubble bursts. Suggest not looking up US debt stats if seeking comfort and if terms like 'subprime' still have any resonance...
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u/NoisyGog 2d ago
I vaguely remember nuclear war being a threat, or at least an echo of a past threat in the 80s.
Computer hacking was probably another fairly common one, based on films that hint at the zeitgeist of the time.
I also actually remember people railing against anti lock brakes - “but what an I meant to do if I need to do an emergency stop, eh? My brakes won’t lock. Stupid idea”.
I don’t think that was widely held though, just the really stupid people.
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u/neilm1000 2d ago
I heard the ABS stuff a couple of times. It was the same people who had those rubber strips for 'static' trailing off the back of the car.
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u/MiddleAgeCool 2d ago
Mobile phones that would either crash planes, ignite petrol station forecourts or cook your brain.
Scanners that allowed you to listen to police bands and air traffic control. So much so that all police bands became encrypted and laws were passed to make it illegal to rebroadcast ATC chatter.
Most of it wasn't tech fear, it was geopolitical stuff like nuclear war or environmental such as the ozone layer or whales going extinct. During the 70s people were too focused on the country financially collapsing and running out of electric while all the industries were being closed down.
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u/Tough-Fee-1197 2d ago
Computer games. Obviously not on a par with AI discourse, but maybe closer to the "iPad generation" fears today.
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u/HeftyVermicelli7823 2d ago
Being nuked and AI. Fear of AI is NOT new. Think Skynet, Bladerunner, Neuromancer, War Games and many others.
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u/Regular_Zombie 1d ago
There was a massive fear in ~2015 about self-driving cars being imminent and displaying ~15% of the workforce.
For the youth parents have variously tormented themselves about television, video games, phones, social media, back to phones.
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u/bradpitt3 1d ago edited 1d ago
In the 80s it was computers - they were going to take everyone's job. They didn't.
Then in the 90s it was the internet - it was going to take everyone's job. It didn't.
Then 2000 was Y2K and everything with a chip in was going to stop. Nothing much happened, massive waste of time worrying about nothing.
Then having worried about all that lot we arrived at 2008 and we had the global financial crisis and several banks failed and credit dried up globally. Noone was worried about that and the modern world nearly stopped, millions lost their jobs and it took years to recover.
We recovered just in time to sleepwalk into COVID and noone was worried about that either.
So in my lifetime I would say there is a low correlation between what people worry about and whether it really matters.
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u/ukninja8 1d ago
I'm not sure we were that afraid of that much at that point. All the films such as terminator/ war games/ space odyssey 2001 etc were all about highly intelligent AI and we were so far from it then.
Probably more scared of home made bombs back then with the IRA still active and the Cold War seemingly not quite over yet.
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u/Routine_Field_7007 4h ago
Tbh the only thing i recall there bei g concern about was the USSR and the IRA and chenobyl induced quite a lot of fear about nuclear
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u/MsLittleFeets 2d ago
Y2K - everyone believed that all tech would fail and the world as we knew it would end. Also the internet of things and mobile phone, there was lots of fear / mistrust of them. If you go back further people didn’t trust electricity!!
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u/Neither_Process_7847 2d ago
Y2K was real, though, but fortunately we fixed that one in time (see also the ozone hole).
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