THE CYBERNATION REVOLUTION

...John I. Snyder, president of U. S. Industries and an automation authority, recently announced production of the TransfeRo-bot, the first all-purpose, off-the-shelf cybernated machine...

...Another indication of the inroads of cybernation comes from a report last year by Senator Joseph Clark's subcommittee on manpower problems that "the goods-producing sector has experienced a net loss of more than three million jobs over the last six years...

...Michael Harrington, author of The Other America...

...President Kennedy attempted this in his 1962 commencement speech at Yale, in which he said that "mythology distracts us everywhere" and then challenged some of our more pervasive myths, especially those concerning deficit spending and the Federal debt...

...This article is concerned with the cybernation revolution...

...The signers of the Triple Revolution statement concluded that our economic system is incapable of providing enough new jobs in the future to meet the explosion in the size of the labor force...

...What was the reaction of such powerful groups in our society as the Administration, labor, and civil rights groups to the Triple Revolution proposals...

...Most of the critics missed the point— that the Triple Revolution statement proposed the creation of as many jobs as possible through public and private investment, but suggested, at the same time, the establishment of an income floor to bolster those who would otherwise fall through to a life of poverty...

...Advocates of "demand expansion" were skeptical...

...At a time when nearly every sixth-grade student can rattle off with facility such space age terminology as megatons and pounds of thrust, his elders remain wedded to such economic myths as "deficit spending is evil" and "the national debt is crushing us...

...It is estimated that this proposal would cost some $1.5 billion yearly if applied to all families with incomes below Federal tax mini-mums...

...Only booming employment in state and local government, and some gains in service industries, has kept our jobless rolls from shooting to astronomical heights...

...trial production and a shrinking number of workers needed to produce many goods and services...

...By coupling the automated machine with a computer, enabling the system to accumulate, store, and evaluate data, the automation process is carried a giant step forward...

...Or more bluntly, can they be provided at all...

...How can we provide these millions of new jobs...

...Harvard history professor H. Stuart Hughes...

...There are some 800,000 jobless school dropouts crowding the nation's streets, but only 25,000 will find room in the Job Corps or rural camps and urban training centers...

...Clearly, the keepers of the national purse are in no mood to provide an adequate Federal stimulus to an economy which papers over the poverty of 35,000,000 Americans with glowing production statistics...

...Although the Triple Revolution statement was sent to the President with little fanfare, committee members were amazed by the instant reaction...

...in which cashing government checks, beer-drinking, television-watching, and general lollygagging would be the main activities of the majority of the people...

...As for the $225 million slated to be spent on Community Action Programs in the coming year, this is less than the Defense Department spends in two days...

...They maintained that loosening the shackles on government spending and fiscal policies could in time generate almost full employment...

...The most ominous statistic, in terms of future unemployment rates, is that which contrasts the number of young people entering the labor force...

...After final polishing, the statement was signed by an additional twenty-nine members of the committee, including Gunnar Myrdal, world-renowned economist...

...The first use of numerical controls in automatic machinery—that is, operating the machine with magnetic tapes or punched cards—took place in 1957...

...In time, the proposal for a minimum income guaranteed by right may seem more reasonable than treasonable...

...The Manpower Development and Training Act, aimed at reclaiming men and women tossed on the industrial slagheap by automation and other technological changes, has fallen far short of the mark...

...This cool reception by the Administration was also typical of the reaction by editorial writers and most economists...

...Most of the members of the Committee, Ferry notes, have been asked "to give lectures, write books, supply copies, appear on television programs, and often to stand trial for treason to the American Way of Life...

...Drafts of the statement shuttled back and forth among these three men until a consensus was reached...

...Six of every ten Negro families lie below the $3,000 poverty level...

...Organized labor is still bound to the "pump-priming" formula...

...Kennedy's Yale speech should have been required reading for every citizen, but its message has not yet filtered down to the man on the street...

...It would require an annual expenditure of only $11 billion to lift the income of every family in the country to the $3,000 level...

...The reaction of Congress to the Clark report was an ill-concealed yawn...

...In the decade between 1950-1960, this group grew by only 2.7 per cent...

...Although cybernation is a new phenomenon, the industrial process has been advancing toward it since the days of James Watts' steam engines and Richard Arkwright's spinning machines...

...The invisible hand of Adam Smith is still turning the pages of our economic textbooks...

...A Neighborhood Youth Corps will provide another 125,-000 youngsters with part-time work so that they can stay in school, but this again only scratches the surface...

...In fact, most members of Congress and the electorate seem to have forgotten that back in 1946, Congress passed the Employment Act, which declared it "the responsibility of the Federal government" to use all its powers to create "useful employment opportunities...

...Last year, Senator Clark's manpower subcommittee urged that Federal expenditures "increase by at least an average of $5 billion a year to provide enough demand to keep pace with labor force growth and productivity increases...

...The Committee argued that these measures should be replaced with a minimum guaranteed income, although it is vague in specifying the level of income subsidy and how it would be administered...

...But far from being a full-scale war, the Kennedy-Johnson program that emerged from Congress provided only enough money to fight the first skirmishes of the war...

...The experience of the declining meat-packing industry is 'Eating Up Jobs" The automation of American industry is accelerating so rapidly that "it is eating up all the jobs that a highly stimulated economy can develop...

...Not even the power of the Presidency has been equal to the task of replacing economic mythology with rationality...

...As reported by Business Week, this was one of the significant findings of experts from the United States, Canada, and a half dozen other nations who recently met in Washington in sessions sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...

...Howard Coughlin, president of the Office Employes Union, has noted that sales of electronic data-processing equipment are expected to increase fourfold by 1970, and he predicts that each computer will eliminate thirty existing or potential clerical jobs...

...The day after the statement was released, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz took special pains to criticize it at the biennial convention of the United Auto Workers, whose members can feel cybernation sniffing at the flanks of the auto industry...

...the guaranteed income proposal agitated the purveyors of the puritan ethic that man shall live by the sweat of his brow, or accept a paltry and crazy-quilt relief dole with the loss of personal dignity that often stigmatizes welfare recipients...

...What roused the editorial writers was the Committee's frontal attack on the economic myth that income must derive only from productive work...

...W. H. Ferry, vice-president of the Fund for the Republic...

...But the steady advance of the cybernation revolution may lead us to acknowledge that the link binding income to work may snap within a decade or two...

...Under the proposal set forth by the Great Society task force, families with incomes too low to be taxed under present rates would receive a partial subsidy to make up the difference...

...But many union members are so concerned with job security for the already-employed that they cannot hear the army of "war-babies" knocking on plant gates...

...Surprisingly, this "negative income tax proposal" has also been made by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, a former adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater...

...He blamed the "rigid application" of screening tests in this and other cases...

...Cybernation carries us beyond automation, itself a word barely dry in our lexicon...

...The device consists basically of an arm and actuator that can be fitted with many types of fingers and jaws...

...They know that twice as many Negro adults and three times as many Negro teenagers are unemployed as are whites in the same age groups...

...Little matter...

...We talk in terms of steps to be taken this fiscal year to reduce unemployment or resolve the balance of payments...

...According to W. H. Ferry, only one per cent of those machines which can be married to computers have so far had this bond consummated...

...And while J. Kenneth Galbraith made the phrase "the affluent society" a popular catchword, Americans have only recently discovered that our affluence hides millions who live in "the other America" of poverty...

...and Ralph Helstein, president of the Packinghouse Workers Union...

...An income floor for every American would not bankrupt the Treasury, and may well be a better answer to the challenge of cybernation than a haphazard and paltry dole...

...The essential argument of the Ad Hoc Committee is that cybernation will bring about both increased indusPETER IRONS, who did social science research at Harvard and Howard Universities, is associate editor of the United Automobile Workers legislative news-weekly...

...Computer experts estimate that by the end of this decade, from thirty to fifty per cent of all machine tools manufactured will by controlled by computer systems...

...How rapidly is cybernation advancing...

...Even the shavings from the Defense Department budget cannot* fuel an all-out attack on poverty as long as we allow the Federal budget, as a proportion of Gross National Product, to shrink each year...

...Not only does Congress seem unaware of the Triple Revolution proposals, but the labor movement appears to have given it little thought...

...It is in discussing this transitional stage that the Committee is most indefinite, although in fairness it should be said that the manifesto's purpose was to foretell the economic crisis ahead and offer not a blueprint but a general proposal to be discussed by thoughtful citizens...

...No reaction has come from the AFL-CIO, although labor intellectuals concede privately that the Triple Revolution statement is stimulating...

...One official of the Packinghouse Workers Union calls the MDTA program "excessively stringent," and noted that after an Armour Company meat-packing plant closed in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1962, only one of 164 applicants was accepted for retraining by MDTA...

...frNTHE CYBERNATION REVOLUTION by PETER IRONS TT'very society is cemented to its her-itage with myths, and no area of our own society is more tightly glued to the past by the mythmakers than that of economics...

...The leading spirits behind the Triple Revolution statement were Robert Theobald, a consulting economist...

...And in the immediate future: "Between automation and population expansion the potential job force is growing so fast that present policies won't cut back the current per cent unemployment ratio —and it will probably continue to climb...

...We are only slowly being weaned from the myths and shibboleths which have made a secular religion of the conventional wisdom in economics...

...A budget of only $784 million for the fiscal year ending June 30 was appropriated to Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity, the quartermaster corps of the war on poverty...

...It may well be the restive rank-and-file, watching the rapid encroachments of cybernation in the plants, who will finally prod the labor movement into action...

...Congress, however, seems smugly satisfied with its war on poverty bill...

...As the number of workers displaced by cybernation mounts, relief, unemployment compensation, and other welfare payments as well as Social Security benefits will become increasingly inadequate...

...Contending that increased Federal spending in the labor-demanding areas of construction and resources development could absorb many thousands of young people, they argue that all these new employment opportunities could keep unemployment to manageable levels...

...How will cybernation effect employment...

...Civil rights leaders, however, especially in militant groups like CORE and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, are beginning to perceive the relation of cybernation to Negro joblessness...

...The slender manifesto boldly asserted that "the traditional link between jobs and income is being broken," and further argued that "the industrial productive system is no longer viable...

...In the sixty years since Veblen's acerbic words, large-scale mechanization and automation have combined to displace millions of human hands by machines...

...Inspired in part by The Other America, Michael Harrington's widely read book, the Kennedy Administration announced a war on poverty to lift out of misery those thirty-five million Americans with family incomes under $3,000 a year...

...For instance, last November the 40,000-member National Association of Social Workers called for a minimum income as "a matter of right" for all Americans...

...Not content with these heresies, the signatories urged that "society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right...

...Eleven billion dollars is twenty-two per cent of our annual military budget and less than two per cent of the Gross National Product...

...Critics pointed to increased education and retraining as a means of shifting workers from declining industries into other industries and the expanding service fields...

...All are controlled by a self-contained electronic brain...

...The task force plan would give them a subsidy of $285, representing the amount of the gap multiplied by the lowest tax rate of fifteen per cent...

...Responding to the critics, W. H. Ferry told the San Diego Forum last November the most common reaction was that "we were in effect advocating the indolent society...

...Clearly, while some steps are being taken to deal with the roots of poverty in America, the amount appropriated by Congress is far short of filling the actual need...

...Not well enough, by any standard...

...But while the Triple Revolution has yet to gain the currency of Galbraith's "affluent society," the statement did trigger a remarkable outpouring of comment...

...Negroes are aware of the bitter truth that they they are "last to be hired and first to be fired...

...Another indication of MDTA stringency is that there are more people being retrained who have attended college than there are trainees with eight years of schooling or less...

...Of those currently enrolled in retraining programs, only 5.7 per cent are more than forty-five years of age, yet twenty-eight per cent of the unemployed are in this age group...

...and Donald B. Armstrong, retired vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company...

...for those able, willing, and seeking to work, and to promote maximum employment...

...This was an uncompromising repudiation of the economic dogma that only those who work deserve the fruits of income, save for the paupers dependent on our patchwork welfare system...

...President Johnson and Congressional leaders have not reacted to the task force proposal, but it is an interesting straw in the wind...

...Cybernation—the marriage of automated machinery and computerized controls—is a recently coined term derived from the Greek word for "steersman...

...Thus the link binding jobs to income must snap, as jobs shrink and the labor force expands...

...rarely do we project ourselves a decade or more into the future in an effort to foresee and forestall coming economic crises...

...Back in 1904, Thorstein Veblen wrote that "the machine is a leveler, a vulgarizer, whose end seems to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble, and dignified in human intercourse and ideals...

...Our economic mythmakers feed us a steady diet of cheerful statistics: total employment is at an all-time high, average incomes are rising, and the Gross National Product is booming...

...The New York Times reported that one application of the TransfeRobot, priced at only $2,-500, is in an automobile plant where "the device feeds partly fabricated parts of a steering assembly to a trimming press and controls the press...

...Donald Michael, social theorist of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, says that "in twenty years, other things being equal, most of the routine blue-collar and white-collar tasks that can be done by cybernation will be...

...A group of thirty-two economists, labor leaders, and business and professional men, residing behind the unwieldy title of The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, sent their manifesto last March to President Johnson and Congressional leaders...

...One example of cybernation in action should suffice...

...The major conclusion of these experts about the U.S...

...How well are such programs as manpower retraining and the war on poverty meeting the cybernation challenge...

...Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American...

...If their income is only $2,500, there is a gap of $1,900...

...It is still a heretical idea, and the Ad Hoc Committee is not about to replace the President's Council of Economic Advisers...

...But during the three-year period from 1960 to 1963, it shot up to 3.6 per cent, and as cybernation advances, this rate should increase...

...The Labor Department reports that the average annual increase in output productivity from 1909-1963 was 2.4 per cent...

...he is rapidly losing his decision-making function as well...

...Not all the reaction was critical...

...It was the subject of front-page stories in both The New York Times and The Washington Post the day after its release, and in the intervening months has generated some 500 heated newspaper and magazine editorials and columns...

...This anthropomorphic employe does not ask for wage increases or coffee breaks, does not demand a pension when it retires, and has never heard of the Wagner Act...

...civil rights leader Bayard Rustin...

...Early in 1964, when the Triple Revolution statement was issued, only 3,000 of the nearly two million machine tools in this country were controlled by computers...

...Headed by Princeton professor Eric Goldman, and composed mainly of people from the academic community, the task forces were urged to let their imaginations roam...

...As Ferry recently remarked, most of the Ad Hoc Committee members expected it to join "the daily spate of proclamations and petitions that flutter half-read into editorial and legislative wastebaskets...

...Our ears have been assaulted so long by the economic mythmakers that few people realize that both Federal spending and the national debt, on a per capita basis, have been declining for more than a decade...

...It is mostly those groups who need retraining—the older and poorly educated workers—who are least represented in MDTA programs...

...A few statistics will show how close this link has come to snapping...

...Claiming that the Triple Revolution proposal was the "wrong answer" to the job deficit problem, Wirtz asserted that "I don't believe that the world owes me a living and I don't believe it owes anybody else a living...

...The proposal of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution has been met with hostility or indifference by the worshippers of balanced Federal budgets and other economic myth-makers...

...Another tentative step in the direction of income subsidies was taken by one of the fourteen task forces set up last year by President Johnson as a seedbed for ideas to build his Great Society...

...Before it took effect, expanded public spending for such needs as health, education, and housing, all coordinated by planning agencies, would be needed to pave the way for the cybernated society...

...John Diebold of the consulting firm, The Diebold Group, reports that the number of computers in this country shot up by 300 per cent from 1960 to 1963, and that the trend is accelerating...

...But in the decade from 1960-1970, the number of young people looking for work will have jumped by forty-five per cent...

...But chilling trends lie behind this happy facade with cybernation beginning to run head-on into a growing labor force which will expand by more than twelve million persons during the next ten years...

...The unqualified right to an income," said the Committee, "would take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures— from unemployment insurance to relief—designed to insure that no citizen or resident of the United States actually starves...

...Not only is man being displaced from his manual function in the productive process...

...Says the Department, "no major sector of the economy with a productivity gain of as much as 2.5 per cent achieved enough increase . . . in [demand for] its production, to prevent a reduction in its work force...

...manpower outlook, said the business weekly, is that "maximum economic growth alone won't relieve current economic employment levels...

...Even white-collar clerical workers are beginning to feel the hot breath of cybernation...

...Even the passage of the Civil Rights Act cannot create jobs where no jobs exist...

...In view of these discouraging symptoms of economic illiteracy, it is surprising to chronicle the speed and extent of the circulation, in the press and by word-of-mouth, of a short statement entitled "The Triple Revolution," issued less than a year ago...

...But the process is mushrooming daily...

...Their solution to this crisis is the advocacy of "new definitions of work" and a guaranteed income floor to assure an escape from poverty...

...But the Employment Act of 1946 is nearing the close of its second decade as a dust-catcher...

...Central to the thesis of the Triple Revolution statement is the contention that the combination of three "revolutions"—the cybernation revolution and the revolutions in civil rights and nuclear weaponry—has added an entirely new dimension to our economic system...

...The Triple Revolution statement agrees on the need for such spending, but argues that cybernation will wipe out even most of these jobs before many years have passed...

...a case in point...

...For instance, a married couple with four children is entitled to personal and standard deductions totaling $4,-400...