Automation: The Retreating Catastrophe

Amateur social scientists such as Norbert Wiener (a professional mathematician) predicted, in 1949, that we faced “a decade or more of ruin and despair” from the wholesale unemployment which would occur in the 1950’s. Cybernation and automation were going to abolish jobs at an unprecedented rate. The prediction was reaffirmed by a parade of witnesses in the mid-1950’s before a Congressional committee investigating automation. Yet, the “decade or more of ruin and despair” from the un employment that was going to be caused by automation appears to have been postponed by at least 17 years. Nevertheless, we still have doom criers who say that this consequence of automation will be appearing in the near future.

Volume 2, Number 3; Autumn 1966