Cybernation: the Trauma that Awaits Us

...Given the planlessness and incoherence of American society, there seems little reason to suppose that cybernation will in the near future lead to our "emancipation...

...Where, asks Mr...

...Michael, would be the effects on the attitudes of a society when a significant part of it is overtly supported by public works programs...

...When President Kennedy recently became indignant because electrical workers had won a 25-hour week, he was being not merely reactionary but also naive and irrelevant...

...Not only will many factory workers and farm laborers lose their jobs...

...What Mr...

...Or if that be too extreme, the question is: How many millions of workers in how many industries will find themselves jobless because of the persistent advance of automated devices...

...Working in heavy industries at unskilled jobs, they have been the easiest to replace by machines, and because of bias in hiring and lack of educational opportunities they find few chances to gain new skills or jobs...

...Cybernated systems "perform with a precision and a rapidity unmatched in humans...

...It is a dangerous situation, for in ways none of us could quite have anticipated, the viability of capitalism, even in its recently modified forms and at a moment when all too many people have begun to accept it as an eternal given, will soon again be at stake...

...But when the task itself is eliminated or new tasks are developed that need different talents, shorter shifts clearly will not solve the problem...

...What then, asks Mr...

...At a Senate hearing into charges that anti-Communist speeches by military officers are being muted by the Pentagon, General White was asked whether it was proper for low-ranking personnel to censor generals and admirals...

...Michael offer much hope in regard to the piece-meal solutions usually advanced for coping with automation...

...Thomas D. White disclosed a personal secret today...

...The consequences of all this are almost impossible to reckon, but a few obvious ones may be worth noting: 1) We face the danger of drifting into a society in which there will appear a new and fierce class division: not merely between owners and workers or rich and poor, but between various skilled elites living in prosperity and a stratum of permanent unemployables, consisting particularly of older workers, the young and the Negroes...

...and they are beginning to perceive and to recognize...

...For— Threatened institutions often try forcibly to repress groups demanding changes in the status quo...

...Macy's has tried out its first electronic sales girl: a machine smart enough to dispense 86 items in 10 separate styles and sizes, and to make correct change (while rejecting counterfeit money) for one- and five-dollar bills...

...A few random examples: • The U.S...

...For very soon the real question will be whether industrial workers will have any hours of work...

...If the building trades were to be automated, it would not mean inventing machines to do the various tasks now done by men...

...Production jobs in the chemical industry have fallen off three per cent since 1956 despite a rise in output of 27 per cent...

...ered together with the probable difficulties the United States will encounter in foreign affairs...

...they can remember and search their memories for appropriate data...

...What strikes one with great force is that the political Right is preparing itself organizationally and ideologically for the battles of tomorrow, while the liberal Left, all too bemused with back-stair manipulations in Washington, does little to ready its followers in the trade unions and the political organizations...

...Mr...

...they can detect and correct errors in their own performance...

...Census Bureau was able to use 50 statisticians in 1960 to do the tabulations that required 4,100 in 1950...

...Bell Telephone has handled a 50 per cent increase in business during the past 10 years with only a 10 per cent increase in personnel...

...His answer is marvelously laconic: Whatever else the attitudes might be, they certainly would not be conducive to maintaining the spirit of a capitalistic economy...

...Imagine, too, the incentives to use force in view of the reserves of volunteer "police" made up of adults who can vent their own unemployedbased hostility in a socially approved way of punishing or disciplining these "children...

...rather buildings would be redesigned so that they could be built by machines...

...The immediate social consequences will be enormous...

...General White, former Air Force Chief of Staff, said with a grin that he might be letting out a secret of the inner circle, then went on to say: "'I rarely personally wrote a speech...

...furthermore, such programs have always provoked bitter political struggles, and are certain to do so in the future...

...The effect upon middle management is also likely to be severe, for computers can already perform many of the tasks usually assigned to it...

...The term cybernation is used by Mr...

...The expectations of social peace so cherished by American liberals seem hardly realistic once these prospects for our domestic economy are consid"Washington, Jan...

...It is commonly argued that with the growth of population, there will always be more need for people in the service industries .. . [But] service activities will also tend to displace workers by becoming selfservice, by becoming cybernated, and by being eliminated...

...But how retrainable are the mass of these unskilled and semiskilled unemployed...

...If they loaf, almost inevitably they are going to become delinquent...

...I have heard there were low-level personnel who reviewed the speeches, but the truth is, they were relatively low-level persons who wrote the speeches in the first place.' "—From the N. Y. Times, Jan...

...25 (AP)—Gen...

...it makes clear that changes of enormous scope are now occurring in our economy...

...Michael proceeds to show is that the blend of automation and computers involves "potentialities . . that are unlimited," with "extraordinary implications for the emancipation or enslavement of mankind...

...2) The power and size of the trade unions seem certain to decline, even if they were—which they probably will not—to undertake bold steps to meet the new conditions...

...The latter conditions are the more likely ones as cybernation becomes more sophisticated...

...Lacking any capacities other than for their office routines, they will find it even more difficult than factory workers to adapt to new circumstances...

...This pamphlet not only brings together authoritative data concerning automation and related developments...

...Imagine the incentives to use force that would exist in a nation beset by national and institutional frustrations and bedeviled by anarchic unemployed-youth movements...

...Michael concludes that "the government will probably be faced for the indefinite future with the need to support part of the population through public works...

...Given the present social attitudes toward such programs, they are likely to be severely damaging to the self-regard of those who must resort to them...

...This would retain the consumer purchasing capacity for X workers in those situations where the nature of the cybernation process is such that X men would do essen tially the same work as X plus Y men used to do...

...Max Horton, Michigan's Director of Employment Security, remarks: I suppose that is as good as any way for getting rid of the unemployed— just keep them in retraining...

...Nor does Mr...

...As usual, it is the Negroes who have suffered the most immediate and painful effect of these social changes...

...The vast number of adolescents preparing to enter the job market—three million will be starting the quest for jobs each year at the end of this decade, as against two million now—are certain to contain many semi-permanent unemployed, particularly among the Negroes...

...Whole areas of employment will soon be wiped out by cybernation, and not merely in the way most of us imagine...

...4) The problem of government intervention in economic life will become a sharper issue in political conflict than it has been these past few decades...

...Nothing important can be done to cope with cybernation short of large-scale and long-range economic planning...

...Michael, will these middle managers go...

...Most important, is there a job waiting for them when they have been retrained...

...yet for a significant fraction of the American people such planning has become anathema, demagogically linked to Communism...

...Cybernation, as Mr...

...Michael remarks, "may contribute substantially to further social disruption...

...Michael to refer to: a) automation, "devices that automatically perform sensing and motor tasks, replacing or improving on human capacities for performing these functions" and b) computers, "devices that perform, very rapidly, routine or complex logical and decision-making tasks, re placing or improving on human capacities...

...so too will office workers, sales personnel, and middle executives...

...They can make judgments based on instructions programmed into them...

...It is hard to imagine that anything written these last few months could cast so harsh a light on the future of our society as Cybernation, a pamphlet written by Donald Michael and published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California...

...Retraining of displaced workers...

...3) The social discrepancies between advanced and underdeveloped nations will become still more startling, and a still greater cause of bitterness, as the advanced countries enter the cybernetic age while the underdeveloped ones still struggle to move into industrialism...