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JACK LUDWIG
Luddite it's clear nothing could be gained from listening to him. Not
treason or disloyalty but naivete, gullibility, doom-and-gloom labels are
attached to the questioner.
So
someone like Albert Wohlstetter can take time out from his
Cold War gaming long enough to tell us that people questioning the
statistics and claims of automation are engaged in "a competition in
ominousness."
As
soon as President Johnson appointed his National
Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress (of
which Bell is a member), dozens of articles sprang up in all sorts of
places, coincidental and spontaneous as a Presidential press conference.
Just as Sir Leon starts his book with the line, "Automation is not a devil,
a Frankenstein," so Peter F. Drucker, two months after the Commission
was appointed, published a go-go article with a similar title, "Automa–
tion Is Not The Villain"
(New York Times Magazine,
January 10,
1965); that same month Charles E. Silberman, just as gung-ho, pub–
lished in
Fortune
his "The Real News About Automation," which opened
with the words, "The effect of automation on employment in the U.S.
has been wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated, principally by social
scientists"; just one day after Drucker's bit, Irving Lipner, in the daily
Times,
attacked the people who present automation as a "nightmare
of millions of permanently unemployed on slag heaps."s
What stands in the way of a dialogue for automation is the dif–
ferent moment to which the questioning men address themselves: one
side seems to be saying, "see what dislocations
full
automation
could
bring"; the other counters with "see what insignificant dislocations
limited
automation
has
brung." We are not even
in
possession of a kind
of Kahn job which might go
You Automate, We Automate, How Many
"Dead" Workers?
Automation has its Garlyles, but not its Matthew
Arnolds. Something Chesterton said about the two is relevant to the
current debates on automation.
3. Drucker's cliche is "scrap heap." Others use "d'ump heap," simply "the
dump," or any comparable image of waste, disuse, or just slowness. The "truth"
which counters always stresses motion, change, dynamic action, churning, adapta–
bility, good games and good places for the good games. A January, 1965, article
in
Look,
"Automation We CAN Handle It," tells of a "man-sized sample of
guts
and brains," Romie G. Sears, Negro, 35, who was "robot-bumped" out of his job
at a Lockheed plant, but turned to "studying the hell out of titanium," and ended
with a better job at higher pay at another Lockheed plant. The language con–
cluding the article is typical of the anti-"ooze"-and-"slag heap" beat these pieces
assume. The American work force "is not a mass of inert, uneducated wage
slaves clumping in and out of factory gates to earn last week's groceries. ... Car–
mobile and competent, he [the
U ,S.
worker] belongs to an army of talent that
strengthens itself on each' struggle"-i.e. losing his job, the latest version of the
Fortunate Fall.
