The robots came in the 1950s for all our jobs
23 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in economic history, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, movies, survivor principle Tags: Apollo 13, automation, technological unemployment
The robots are coming have got nothing on the mid 20th century in terms of man being replaced by a machine.
One of my favourite scenes from Apollo 13 happens to be online. Tom Hanks and the Apollo 13 crew and ground control were using slide rules to make the critical calculations about re-entry trajectories. That had not been automated in 1969.
I went to high school just after slide rules were replaced by simple calculators.
I am reading some great essays from the 1960s at the moment about the great fear that people had from the computer entering the factory.
The reason for claiming that this time it was different was computed could automate calculations millions of times faster than people could. The computer could monitor and react to events without human intervention as Yale Brozen explained in the mid-60s
The hallmarks of automation, to distinguish it from mechanization or automatic
methods, are its sensing, feed-back, and self-adjusting characteristics. Because it senses changing requirements and adjusts without human intervention, it presumably does away with the need for human attendants or human labor. This is very fearful indeed to those who depend upon jobs for their livelihood.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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