American Notebook: How Digital Were My Computers?
Detroit
True enough the Ford people asked Walter Reuther how he was going to collect dues from those automata and Walter Reuther answered how are you going to sell them cars. It is also so...
...Automation, by transplanting facotries from their former city sites and by displacing men at their old tasks, is weakening the industrial unions that came out of the New Deal...
...AN IMAGE...
...How would you go about writing an advertisement on yourself...
...The positive changes going on outside the jurisdiction of cities and counties create vacuums which militate against the possibility of developing effective programs to deal with the negative consequences of changes in the near future...
...Success Formula The few people or agencies who give the impression of having looked through a window recently which faces on the world make an odd assembly: Norbert Wiener, Lewis Mumford, who was superbly prescient about the technological logic twenty years ago, and David Beck and James Hoffa and their associates in the Teamsters Union...
...it was translated into most of the political languages around the world, and translated back into English...
...Moreover, automation may undermine the influence of the labor movement itself in the lives of the surviving workers, for the personnel of automated plants tend to be professional: engineers, mathematicians, physicists, designers, experimental tool and die, occupations which are encouraged to remain outside unions by the Taft-Hartley Law, and which on their own account have not been powerfully attracted to collective bargaining...
...When companies locate new plants outside existing legal communities, they gain freedom from local controls and taxes at the same time other forces tend to pull the nation's cities apart...
...In the automobile industry any approach to continuous production multiplies profits so embarrassingly that they appear politically troublesome in the same way that any flow product when quantified in the magnitudes of everyday Iife, water, air, gas, oil, for example, is characterized by impossibly large multipliers which magnify any unit profit out of economically finite bounds...
...Automation, long pause, eliminates the governing ratio which in the earlier technology connected the number of people employed in production to the unit output...
...Bernice Fitz-Gibbon in Glamour, Sept...
...In the earliest days water was brought from the lake to the village in goatskins...
...By inadvertence, and not by art, much that is written about automation is comic in the tradition of Chaplin, in that it is as clearly ridiculous when applied to the developing scene as Chaplin was hilariously comical reacting to nuts and bolts as he would to nipples and bodies...
...The production and delivery of water no longer depended on manpower...
...The event itself is concealed by an iron curtain, or perhaps is lost in the folds of a wrinkled belly, or obscured by the unclulations of rice in the fields of Indo...
...But while hardly anyone has paid much attention to the voices of Wiener and Mumford, the hands of Beck and Hoffa have reached out to lay hold of the vulnerable arteries upon which automated industries are still organized — the Teamster — organized over-the-road trucks, Teamster-organized loading docks and Teamster controlled warehouses...
...Then one day a huge pipeline was built connecting the village and the lake...
...Automation is a rubric which comprehends a decisive qualitative change in the production process...
...DECISIONS accompanying automation, moreover, raise additional questions...
...People and activities are leaving the cities along with industry...
...The evolution from the shopkeeper, family farm, tradesman, small business economy to the IBM, General Motors, DuPont of the present...
...Getting more water within a wide range no longer required the employment of additional personnel or trucks, except perhaps for production increases far beyond what one village would ever require...
...Here the literature quotes Del Harder, Ford Vice-President or John Diebold, the precocious author of the first book on automation, and who between them, share credit for inventing the word...
...Whatever will happen, however, at the present time, existing political boundaries frustrate most social efforts to control and direct technologically animated community alterations...
...It is a second industrial revolution which heralds the arrival of devices that will transform the society as completely as the first industrial revolution made the 19th century a monster outgrowth of the 18th century...
...All this with footnotes...
...One man driving a two-thousand tank truck was enormously more productive of water than the original goatskin boy, but water output could still be measured in man output...
...When donkeys and leather skins, and later clay jars began to be used one man could transport more water than before to the village, but still the number of men and donkeys and pots was a measure of the total production of water...
...Additional water became a matter of opening a valve wider...
...This will be brought about by shorter hours, higher wages, longer vacations, training on the job for workers whose skills are made obsolete by technological developments, earlier retirement, pay on automated jobs commensurate with the new vocabulary used to describe their activities, relocation allowances, a guaranteed wage, and a greatly expanded education system geared to teach everyone from the cradle to the grave both to operate the machines of the future and to enjoy the leisure the new electronic brains and hands will produce...
...An inevitable impression from a reading of the literature is that very few people or agencies have actually looked outside in the last ten years...
...It is also so that Newsweek said that the Ford Engine Plant in Cleveland produces ten times the engines with half the manpower, but this was a mistake in the first place, very hyperbolic, but everyone who wrote or spoke about automation thereafter repeated it...
...1955...
...The precursor to the automatic factory, the atomized factory, produced a great comic work of genius, the movie "Modern Times...
...Consider yourself a commodity to be sold...
...The smoothly worn phrase, economy of abundance, has been prematurely polished down to meaninglessness now that an actual eternity of abundance emerges, and hardly anyone, no politician or political statesman for business or labor, seems to have recognized it, or to have connected its consequences to price policy or to have made room in his calculations for its impact...
...You have your choice between the lowbrow Detroit automation, which is no more than a contemptuous step forward in materials handling, the automatic movement of objects being processed from one manufacturing stage to another, or you can take the highbrow definition, not Detroit Public Relations but the MIT Division, which talks of closed loops and servo-mechanisms operated by binary computers with tentacled tapes in systems that can do everything human beings can do, plus many things they can't do...
...DIRE DAYS IMPEND...
...the passing of the direction of political parties from human bosses of political machines (small businesses) to the institutionalized companies, labor unions and other bureaucracies all relatively impervious to democratic penetration...
...The number of people who could carry goatskins, the goatskins available, determined the quantity of water delivered to the village...
...Automation, statements specify, must not be confused with run of the mine technological change...
...A demand on automated, corporate, enterprises, if they are successful, as Ford, GM, Chrysler, General Electric, DuPont, Excello, IBM and dozens of others are, to lower their prices has not been made because serious price cuts by the front running enterprise would have put most of its competitors out of business...
...Thus, the Teamsters are from day to day, because of these developments, increasingly capable of saying yes or no to any economic activity, automated or not, whether the feedback operates an open or closed circuit, no matter how the servo-mechanisms are activated, by tape or punch card or by digital or analogical computers...
...Furthermore, it has become plain that within the range of possible price changes, increases or decreases have relatively little effect on distribution...
...The grand design presents an image of a runaway world, a cybernetic device out of control, or under dominance of a feedback operating in a hermetically sealed circuit—at least hermetically sealed against any entry with the blunted political notions embodied in the speeches on automation to date...
...It became possible to get water for every imaginable need by turning a valve...
...Retraining programs for the 900,000 displaced workers, keeping the example uncomplicated, sounds sensibly Utopian now, but in the context of the days ahead they will reveal themselves to be colorful, drifting screwballs, as inapplicable to the situation in the world as the Townsend Plan...
...Should the million workers in existing automobile plants be supplanted by 100,000 in the relocated auto industry of the 1960's, a Guaranteed Annual Wage, a 100 per cent increase in wages, a thirty hour week for them will not weigh a penny-worth in the economy...
...Is automation a totally new concept?, the reports ask...
...In the automated flow industries, any feasible price generates profits of a magnitude which introduces a new dimension into the society outside the reach of the anti-trust laws, the Robinson Patman Act and similar rules of the road in the same way that an airplane is a dimension beyond highway regulations...
...together organize a history where human beings have less and less and less voice...
...The concurrence of these movements suggests the possibility that displaced workers may become the unemployed inhabitants of economically gutted cities...
...some disastrous, automated electronic event which will emerge from a plastic die could amount to a greater setback in the struggle against the totalitarians than the loss of three divisions...
...prints and make tools and dies better than a machinist can in person, and simultaneously in a hundred cities, not to mention the white collar machines that watch over banks far more effectively than human tellers, that detect forgeries, pull in the string on I88 kited checks, compute payrolls and make adjustments on checks to take account of medical expenses for children born last June who had scarlet fever in September...
...Within the calculable future, presumably, unless MIT is a gag and Norbert Wiener is the pseudonym of S. J. Perelman, the manufacture of metal products, the stamping and assembly of many electrical objects, the production of chemicals, plastic forms and fibers and the performance of a variety of white collar labors will be technologically beyond automatic regulation by manpower limitations, or by wages, prices, or profits in the old fashioned supply and demand way, just as the economic determinations which formerly located industries in cities and particular areas will also cease to be relevant in many particulars...
...Thus when a Detroit automation engineer was asked what the hourly rate of the remaining two workers of an original hundred should be, he replied pay them what you want, if you want to be generous pay them ten bucks an hour, it doesn't matter...
...The increasing exclusion of human beings from the production and distribution of goods and services has a parallel in the economic and social machinery of the American society...
...These facilities are the external assembly lines of the new, glass-paneled factories with which the companies are ornamenting the countryside in a vast movement toward decentralization...
...Even here a man was not needed because the valve could be engineered so that it opened and closed as the need for water increased or decreased...
...china except for the fact that the labor movement does have a program that will ambush disaster and make the robots the servants of humanity in a glorious age that will be unveiled by the efforts of people of good will working on PAC Committees, and somehow ratified in negotiations between the companies and the unions in new contracts which will not simply include cost of living adjustments and automatic annual improvement factors, but also a feedback that will operate a complex transistor brain powered by the sun, and set to tell the weight and fortune of every worker whenever he passes the time clock...
...The oil industry, as everyone knows who has read any of the articles on automation, is now on a flow basis, output is not measured in units but in another magnitude—flow rates...
...The literature also refers to the ordnance plant where they put the man in simply to relieve the anxieties of the engineer who designed the place, the television industry which came and went and never did get around to employing the huge numbers of people that had been predicted...
...A central economic switch has been put at the beautifully manicured fingertips of the Teamster Union leaders...
...There is a lake and a village...
...Whites are fleeing to restricted suburbs, shopping centers are emanating quanta-like onto rural land two and three rings beyond urban boundaries...
...Price in the new economic order is less meaningful as a regulation of supply and demand, but more crucial in determining the location of political power...
...Negotiating higher wages for workers in automated plants will become a useful but inconsequential activity in the new technological employment...
...Horsedrawn water wagons superseded the donkey carts, then tank trucks...
...In general, the brush of automation against the society not only makes machinery and men obsolescent, but also accentuates the developing impotence of political agencies...
...the conquest of the labor movement by spokesmen, technicians and specialists with the consequent decline in rank and file control...
...The workers who will remain in the automated production process could be represented with the highest efficiency by a union and still the bargaining decisions would presumably be a backwater activity so far as the control of automation for social purposes is affected...
...A qualitative, decisive alteration in the life process, it is something called feedback, it gives change in the CocaCola machine, it is selling stockings and sandwiches, and soon, by reacting to the color of a man's eyes through a transistor using impulses over a stamped electric circuit it will automatically add the exact amount of cream to the automated coffee anyone habitually uses, and if the patron is diabetic it will shoot him full of insulin when he bends over to agonize...
...Wages ceased to be a factor in production costs...
...True enough the Ford people asked Walter Reuther how he was going to collect dues from those automata and Walter Reuther answered how are you going to sell them cars...
...Dear Karel Capek, the sweepers have gone, every semi-automatic operation is on its way over the horizon, there is a device that can read blue...
...PtucE, which traditionally for most products is bottomed on a limiting connection between an input of effort, unit labor costs, and a product output measured in costs, becomes unrepresentational and abstract...
Vol. 3 • April 1956 • No. 2
