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340 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. iv (1962)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0340 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD The word automation entered the language about a dozen years ago. It im- mediately caught the public fancy, and, today, the popular media of communica- tion carry what is undoubtedly a surfeit of description and speculation on auto- mation. The public seems to have embraced the term with more enthusiasm than clarity of understanding. In some contexts, automation seems to be used to mean anything that causes displacement-or unemployment-of labor; in other contexts, the term seems to be synonymous with technological change; and, at another ex- treme, some popular writers seem to assume that true automation necessarily involves only something fuzzily identified as electronics. This variety of usage has stimulated great controversy regarding the effects of automation. One line of thought has been that basically there is nothing new about automation, that it is simply technological change under another name, that we know all about such change, and that historically our economy has always auto- matically solved any problems of adjustment that have arisen. An opposed line of thought has been that automation is fundamentally different from what we have known as technological change in the past, that automation is the application of a number of all-but-incredible scientific breakthroughs in recent years, and that au- tomation and other scientific developments-such as nuclear weapons-have turned our society in new directions and have imposed entirely new requirements on it. In this symposium, scientists, engineers, social scientists, and spokesmen for management, labor, and government consider a variety of aspects of automation. The topics discussed necessarily represent a selection from a far larger number of important aspects of the subject, and each author undoubtedly would have found it far easier to write 50,000 words on his assigned topic than to limit his discus- sion to 4,000 or 5,000 words. This symposium is intended to be an introduction to the subject for the layman rather than a compendium for the expert. It would be presumptuous to undertake to summarize the symposium because of the complexity of the subject matter and the diversity of viewpoints repre- sented. Yet the symposium seems to justify certain broad conclusions.1 Tech- nology is composed of many strands, and one of them is mechanization. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the emphasis in mechanization was the substitution of inanimate energy sources for human or animal muscles. In more recent times, the emphasis in mechanization has been on devices that can perform more and more complex sequences of operations with less aad less human assist- ance. The key to achieving this emphasis has been the development of mechanical substitutes not only for muscular energy but for other human faculties as well. Thus, mechanical equivalents for sensory organs have been invented; an example is the electric eye. Designers long ago learned how to build a kind of memory into a complicated machine so that it could remember all of the details of a series of operations; gears, cams, and a variety of other mechanical linkages pro- vided the means. Self-correcting, or automatically controlled, machines have a long lineage which includes Watt's flyball governor and the furnace thermostat. i It should be noted that at least some of the other authors might not agree with this formu- lation, and they should not be held responsible for it. iv

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