VARIETY
THE SOFT MACHINE
Sir Leon Bagrit is a British industrialist totally committed to
automation. Though his
The Age of Auromation
1
sometimes echoes
Blimp, and sounds like an updated vision of a nineteenth-century captain
of industry, Bagrit is actually a new kind of Shavian hero, energetic,
optimistic, impatient with the cliches and sentimentalities of politicians
and social workers. He is Lazarus retrained. Lazarus who has glimpsed
the wonders of the world automation could deliver, fretting in the midst
of the inadequacies of the unautomated here-and-now. In Sir Leon's new
world this old globe is but a massive concatenation of struggling bits and
inputs not yet properly programmed. With proper leadership and jaunty
courage chaos could be ordered as simply as iron filings arranged to suit
a magnet. People would be born where they were needed, and not were
they were not; nutrition would be adjusted, education properly fed in,
and lo! this small 0 we're now trapped in would give way to that
magnificent universe which
kno~s
no scarcity and celebrates its leisure
and hears more than the music of the spheres in the soft whir of the
working computer's reels.
Sir Leon is no intellectual. No theoretician. His description of the
world as it is seems at times uninformed, his vision of the world as it
might be quite removed from our psychological realities. His voice is full
of the incoherence and disorderliness of men who want a world of
doing. He speaks, though, for and to the universe McLuhan describes.
The computer is Sir Leon's bobsled, his chariot, his Olympic vehicle.
He will win the wreath not for himself but for all mankind. "Get on
with it," Lazarus cries out, and draws the new world with a flourish:
a harmonium, computers and machines and men and production and
linear programming and supply feeding consumption which regulates
production which keeps supply exact. And since all this is possible why
'isn't more of it actual?
1.
THE AGE OF AUTOMATION. By
Sir
Leon Bagrit. New American
Library. $0.60.
