Wiener and the Changing Industrial Estate

In the early 1950s Norbert Wiener wrote a readable version of what Cybernetics may bring forth. For those not in the know cybernetics is what has happened to manufacturing, robots, computers, and little need for people as workers.

Wiener said: 

Let us remember that the automatic machine, what­ever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must ac­cept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is per­fectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present reces­sion and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries, possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities. However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an in­dustrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally.

Thus the new industrial revolution is a two-edged sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such a benefit is possible. It may also be used to destroy humanity, and if it is not used intelligently it can go very far in that direction. There are, however, hopeful signs on the horizon. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, I have participated in two big meetings with representatives of business manage­ment, and I have been delighted to see that awareness on the part of a great many of those present of the social dangers of our new technology and the social obligations of those responsible for management to see that the new modalities are used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf. There are many dangers still ahead, but the roots of good will are there, and I do not feel as thoroughly pessimistic as I did at the time of the publication of the first edition of this book.

Wiener was quite prescient at the time. He saw machines replacing humans in factories. I have had conversations with many who say the US is declining because we no longer "make" anything. Frankly in a Wienerian sense no one else is also, despite the Chinese.

The Cybernetic threat poses a difficult conundrum. We have had a society where we could put people to work on farms and then factories. Now the best we seem to do is get them iPhones and iPads, the soma of our current society.

What is needed in a Cybernetic Age is creativity and productivity, developing value added elements with intelligent workforces not just bodies.