Tag: Labour
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The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
After the Second World War, philosophers were playing a bit of a game of catch up behind the scientists. The war machine had driven all sorts of advancement, but there wasn’t a lot of thought about the impacts to people…
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Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we may think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labour. Any labour which competes with slave labour must accept the economic conditions of slave labour. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries – possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities. However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an industrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
The machine plays no favourites between manual labour and white-collar labour. Thus the possible fields into which the new industrial revolution is likely to penetrative are very extensive, and include all labour performing judgements of a low level, in much the same way as the displaced labour of the earlier industrial revolution included every aspect of human power. There will, of course, be trades into which the new industrial revolution will not penetrative either because the new control machines are not economical in industries on so small a scale as not to be able to carry the considerable capital costs involved, or because their work is so varied that a new taping will be necessary for almost every job.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society