new permanent condition. The conclusions reached by one report were
disturbing indeed:
The situation we are now facing is entirely without precedent in human
history, because up to less than 100 years ago the human body was the most
efficient machine for energy conversion on earth. The advent of technology
makes all findings based on human labor irrelevant because the rate of energy
conversion of the modern machine is many thousand times that of man. Up to
the year 1890 the movement of the social body in terms of energy production
might be compared to the progress of an ox cart. Since 1890, by comparison,
it has attained the speed of an aeroplane and is constantly accelerating.37
The idea that the world would now belong to the technicians who designed and
ran the machinery was naturally frightening to those who did not deem
themselves capable of becoming scientists—that is, most people—and it must
have resulted in a hesitation to spend, invest, and hire, which worsened and
prolonged the Great Depression.
The New York Times in 1933 described some amazement at the strength of the
technocracy fad:
The sensational nature of the technocratic case caused a mass movement that
was almost hysterical. Many of those who read Scott’s prediction that there
would be 20,000,000 unemployed within two years unless something were
done along lines set forth by him, vague as these were, looked to the
imminent collapse of our industrial and economic system. Business contracts
were even held up because of the fear engendered by technocracy.38
The technological unemployment narrative appears to have saturated the
population by sometime in the 1930s. Afterward, references to it did not need to
use the phrase technological unemployment because everyone understood the
concept. For example, a long 1936 New York Times article deploring the tragic
effects of long-term unemployment on the human spirit and on family relations
did not refer to any theory of unemployment beyond stating that the unemployed
people described “have been superannuated less by age than by newly invented
machines.”39

The Narrative Turns to World War II
Though the technological unemployment narrative faded after 1935 (as revealed
by Google Ngrams), it did not go away completely. Instead, it continued to exert
some influence in the run-up to World War II, until new narrative constellations
about the war became contagious.
Many historians point to massive unemployment in Germany to explain the
accession to power of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in the election of 1933, the
worst year of the Depression. But rarely mentioned today is the fact that a Nazi
Party official promised that year to make it illegal in Germany to replace men
with machines.40
Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times marks a narrative that was so
powerful that it remains in collective memory today. The movie contained a
hilarious scene41 in which a company adopts a new technology that allows it to
streamline the workers’ lunch hour by having robotic hands feed the employee
his lunch. When Charlie Chaplin is fed his lunch, the machine malfunctions and
speeds up to such a rate that it creates a terrible mess. Not coincidentally, the
story was contagious at a time of high concern with labor-saving machines.
Searching for mention of robots in the news during World War II, we find
some examples. Early in the war a Yale scientist, Clark Hull, was working
toward eventually developing armies of robot soldiers.42 But the account of his
efforts sounded far-off and far-fetched. The “robot bombs” and “robot planes”
used by the Nazis later in the war were reported to be ineffective.43 Instead, the
news was filled with narratives of great heroism by real human soldiers.
To go viral again, the labor-saving machines narrative needed a new twist
after World War II, a twist that could seem to reinforce the newly rediscovered
appreciation of human intelligence, and, ultimately, of the human brain. The
narrative turned to the new “electronic brains”—that is, computers. The phrase
electronic brain has a beautiful epidemic curve peaking around 1960, which is
indicative of a constellation of machines narratives then that we explore in the
next chapter.

Chapter 14
Automation and Artificial Intelligence
Replace Almost All Jobs
The narrative of technological unemployment as causing a problem for the
indefinite future did not disappear with World War II. In fact, it repeatedly
mutated and took on a different sort of virulence, often associated with the terms
automation or artificial intelligence, as Figure 14.1 shows. There were at least
four post–World War II narratives about artificial intelligence, peaking,
respectively, in the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s, and 2010s. As of this writing, the
artificial intelligence narrative of the 2010s looks to be heading even higher.
Each time, the narrative suggested that the world was only just now reaching
a frightening major turning point when the machines take over. Because
Rossum’s Universal Robots (described in the preceding chapter) could talk, they
represented a form of artificial intelligence, but there was no story regarding
how such intelligence might be achieved. The robots were like the talking
animals in children’s stories. But the idea of automation and artificial
intelligence repeatedly gained new epidemic proportions as the ideas took on
new concreteness.
Fears of automation were likely associated with fears of an impending
depression. A year-end 1945 Fortune public opinion survey conducted by Elmo
Roper asked the US public:
Do you expect we probably will have a widespread depression within ten
years or so after the war is over or do you think we probably will be able to
avoid it?