FIGURE 14.1. Percentage of Articles Containing the Words Automation and Artificial Intelligence in News
and Newspapers, 1900–2019
The automation and artificial intelligence narratives have recurred several times, with variations in the story
each time. Source: Author’s calculations from ProQuest News & Newspapers.
The results:
Per cent
Have a depression
48.9
Probably avoid it
40.9
Don’t know
10.21
So about half the US population “expected” a depression after World War II.
Most likely, their answers reflected their still-strong memories of the Great
Depression and post–World War I narratives that we have discussed rather than
any clear forecast.
Fortunately, these expectations were wrong; there was no recurrence of
depression. Yes, there was a fatalistic fear of a returned depression, but the angry
narratives of the recent depressions had faded, including the angry narrative of
profiteering that contributed to the post–World War I depression. That narrative
just did not restart. In addition, the idea that prices should fall to 1913 levels no

longer seemed realistic. The end of World War II was also a distraction that
temporarily reduced attention to technological unemployment. Instead, a
constellation of economic narratives after World War II began to suggest that it
was all right to spend money now that the war was over. (We discuss profiteering
and the expectation of lower prices in more detail in chapter 17.)
Among these narratives was the story of the many expensive vacations that
Americans were taking right after the war, which offset the frugality narratives
of the Great Depression. “The greatest surge in travel in the history of the
Americas” was on, and 1946, the year after the end of the war, was dubbed the
“Victory Vacation Year.”2 Even a couple years before the war ended, travel
agents and vacation resorts in the Western hemisphere had begun promoting the
extravagant traveling victory vacation as a way for consumers to spend some of
the wealth they’d socked away in government war bonds.
When the vacations actually happened in 1946, the vacationers duly recorded
them on new Ready-Mounts (35mm color slides) and stored those slides in a
new case that complemented last year’s Christmas present, a slide projector.3
Also, consumers used home movie cameras (which had been mostly unavailable
until the years after World War I) to create extensive travelogues. These slides
and movies of the vacation, as well as of the new baby (that’s me, born in 1946),
were shown to friends and relatives back home, spreading the sense of happy
times and a patriotic feeling about the shared experience of spending
extravagance.
People also began to see their new optimism bolstered by their perceptions of
others’ optimism. The baby boom, first noted in 1946, marked a big difference
from the end of World War I, which was followed by a deadly influenza
epidemic instead of a baby boom. The new optimistic stories after 1948 became
a self-fulfilling prophecy, a term coined in 1948 by Robert K. Merton. A 1950
newspaper article asserted:
With such an optimistic consensus as has developed at this year end, the
forecasting itself can have the effect of helping to promote high activity.4
But the question we must ask is this: Why did so many people in 1945, at the
end of World War II, expect a postwar depression? And why did the intermittent
recessions in the 1950s and 1960s interrupt the overall optimism? The answer
must lie in good part in a Great Depression narrative that still had intermittent

power in the postwar period: the same technological unemployment narrative but
in mutated form.

The Automation Recession Narrative
The same “zero hour” for the labor-saving machinery economic narrative that
appeared in 1929 reappeared late in the second half of the twentieth century, but
in mutated forms.
The term singularity began to be used after Einstein published his general
theory of relativity in 1915. The word denotes a situation in which some terms in
the equations became infinite, and it was used to describe the astronomical
phenomenon of what came to be called the black hole: a “singularity in space-
time.” But later the glamorous term singularity came to be defined as the time
when machines are finally smarter than people in all dimensions.
Such mutations in the economic narrative shifted attention from the muscles
being replaced by electrical machines to the brain being replaced by artificial
intelligence. The basic technological unemployment narrative is the same, but
the examples have a wider scope. First, giant locomotives and electrical power
equipment economized on human muscle power. After the mutation, the
narrative focused on computers replacing human thinking. This mutation
refreshed the narrative.
The term automation differs from labor-saving in that automation suggests no
one is near the production process, except perhaps for a technician in a distant
control room who presses buttons to start the process. Automation was then
described starting in the 1950s not just as machines, but rather as “machines
running machines.”5 It suggests a process that runs by itself with no one even
paying attention.
Around 1955, the word automation suddenly launched into an epidemic.
There was considerable public worry that jobs would be replaced. Notably,
electronic data processing began to run whole business operations. The new
narrative was of a more wholesale replacement of human involvement in
production than in the technological unemployment narrative of the 1920s and
1930s. The year 1956 saw the first “automation strike … fomented by fear of the
push-button age.”6 Stories were told of an unimaginable leap forward in
automation. This from 1956:
Visitors to an Eastern manufacturing plant stared in amazement recently as
they viewed a new type of factory in operation. While they watched,