Herman J. Muller, “... Therefore Choose Life” (Santa Barbara, California: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1965), p. 37.
6. Cybernated Technology
How would you like to have a guaranteed life income of $100,000 per year—with no taxes? And how would you like to earn this income by working a three-hour day, one day per week, for a five-year period of your life, providing you have a six-months vacation each year? Sound fantastic? Not at all with modern technology. This is not twenty-first-century pie-in-the-sky. It could probably be achieved in ten years in the United States if we applied everything we now know about automation and computers to produce a cybernated society. It probably won’t be done this rapidly, for it would take some modern thinking applied in an intelligent crash program. Such a crash program was launched to develop the atomic bomb in a little over four years. It might otherwise have taken thirty years. We get moving if we’re threatened, but we chew the fat a long time when it comes to constructive improvements in human affairs.
You will recall that there are three factors that will play a vital role in the evolution of our civilization. One is our value system. Another factor is our method of thinking. The third is the state of our technology—the methods and machines for producing goods and services. The technological wave of the future will involve automated machines guided by computers.
When Queen Julianna of the Netherlands saw a demonstration of an electronic computer at an Amsterdam exhibition, she said, “I can’t understand it. I can’t even understand the people who can understand it.” But the situation isn’t really as bad as the queen implies. It isn’t necessary to understand how a computer works any more than it is necessary to understand how the internal combustion engine in your car works for you to enjoy the benefits of the automotive age. The important thing is that we understand the effects of automation and computers. And that’s what this chapter is about.
“The electronic computer,” says Dr. Louis T. Rader, a vice-president of General Electric, “may have a more beneficial potential for the human race than any other invention in history.” Sir Leon Bagrit, who is the head of Britain’s Elliot-Automation, has said that the computer and automation will bring, “the greatest change in the whole history of mankind.” Let’s find out what they’re talking about.
Automation simply means replacing human hands and feet by machines that do the same job—only better. Computers today replace human brains with electronic equipment that manipulates figures, makes programmed decisions, and gives instructions far more efficiently than any human. Cybernation means the control of the entire factory by a computer that acts in place of the boss.
Development of Automation
The purpose of machines is to lighten the burden of work. Suppose there were no machines. In such a society a person might have to work from 100 to 200 days per year just to get enough food for himself. To produce even a shirt to cover his back could require over 100 hours of labor! Suppose you would have to produce a shirt under primitive conditions. How many hours would you spend preparing soil and growing the cotton? After the cotton bloomed you’d have to pick it, tease out the seed, and spin the fiber into thread. Once you have enough thread, you could weave it into cloth. Then you would need to cut the cloth into the form of a shirt and sew it together. Imagine the amount of time it would take if your only tools were a hoe, a knife, and a needle.
The time needed to produce a shirt took a nose dive back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when much of the work became mechanized and concentrated in factories. The development of the cotton gin, which separated the seed from the white cotton fiber, the invention of machinery that made thread, and the design of looms that wove the thread into cloth enabled a better shirt to be manufactured with only several hours of human labor. Today a shirt may represent only a little over one hour of human time from seed to salesman!
In the twentieth century mass production with assembly lines and improved machinery greatly reduced the cost of producing goods. Automation is based on all of the principles of mechanization and mass production, but it goes one step further. Previously factories needed humans to operate each machine. Automated machines operate themselves. Through “feedback” mechanisms they observe what they are doing. They give themselves instructions, and they check on the quality of their output. They work faster and at speeds that would kill a human. They don’t get tired and they don’t forget. They never go out on strike or ask for pay increases. Factory design is simplified. Automatic machines don’t need parking lots, air conditioning, bright lighting, wash rooms, lunchrooms, or coffee breaks. They don’t even need buildings for many types of work.
Automatic machines have been, or soon will be, designed to perform almost any conceivable task done by human beings. Since we have only two hands, it is possible to design automatic machines that will far exceed the manipulative ability of a human. In 1961 U.S. Industries announced that they had developed the first general-purpose automation machine at a price of around $2,500. It is called the TransfeRobot. Its swinging arm and hand is infinitely superior to any human arm or hand. It never gets tired, and the electronic brain guiding it seldom goofs off. It picks things up and puts them down with an accuracy of two thousandths
