““Corporate interests raised a nearly unified voice heralding automation as a certain and universal beneficial advancement. However, some observers saw the new technology as a cause for concern and cautioned that the final word on automation would depend on the choices that industry and the nation made in the face of difficult questions regarding the pace of automation’s implementation, the uses of the new productivity, and the fate of displaced workers as well as depleted or eliminated job classifications, communities, and even industries. Norbert Wiener, for example, a prominent MIT mathematician and pioneer in the science of cybernetics, emphasized the potentially calamitous economic and social consequences of the new production technology. Wiener had begun to express concerns about the impacts of automation on labor and the entire society during World War II, and he authored two books in the immediate Cold War years warning that potentially disastrous unemployment and related social problems may come from industry’s drive toward automation. He characterized automation and computer controls in the production process as the “modern” or “second” industrial revolution, which even more than the first held “unbounded possibilities for good and evil.” 104 In particular, Wiener feared that the larger impact of the changes caused by automation would be a massive displacement of workers, compounded by the profit-driven indifference of industry. “The automatic machine … will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.” 105””
