ARGUMENTS
Carlyle professed to be a Jeremiah and even a misanthrope.
But he was really a demagogue and, in one sense, a flatterer....
He told Englishmen . . . all the things they like to be told
they are, all the things that they are not. He told them, indeed,
with a dark reproachfulness, that their strengths were lying
neglected or inert. Still he reminded them of their strengths;
and they liked
him.
But they did not like Arnold, who placidly
reminded them of their weaknesses.
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Even the title given the President's Commission on Automation is
an indication that this government and this time have no use for bad
news; not economic "change," or even a fairly neutral label such as
economic "development," sets the Commission's goal: it carries the label
"Economic Progress" as its charge, and one would
be
surprised to find
its final report out of keeping with so clear a label.
But
if
one reads Bagrit's book without its propaganda and sales
pitch foremost,
if
one concentrates on what he is trying to tell the
public about the world to come, a clear picture of automation's effect
emerges.
He does, for instance, clearly differentiate "limited" from "full"
automation, not just for a single industry alone, but for the entire
industrial complex. His rapid shift from description to exhortation comes
because he thinks people who fear automatons and dehumanization may
accept
limited
automation but not the
full
automation which all coun–
tries need but which Britain, lagging behind, needs more.
It is interesting to notice that we will often accept a limited
degree of automation-the automatic pilot in an aircraft, for
instance-but we are reluctant to see the human buffer-in the
shape of the pilot-go completely.
Gently Sir Leon tells us that in the age of supersonic flight the pilot as
a flyer of his plane is not only obsolete but dangerous. The pilot must
use his instruments and radar, "electronic extension[s] of his faculties,"
by which "the possibilities have been predigested for him," and thus
make the correct choices. Cautiously Sir Leon sneaks in the great dis–
tinction automation makes: the pilot now is "safeguarding, not flying."
The man involved with a closed-loop oil system whose derrick pumps
oil into a pipeline which carries it to where it is processed, and from
there to the tanks from which it is sold, and from which figures are fed
back to regulate the rate of the derrick's pumping, is also "safeguarding,"
not
laboring
in the sense we have always understood that word: his
function has brought an eerie, lonely word into industrial language: he
is called a "witness."
