enormous sheets of steel were fed into a conveyor system. Then the steel
traveled along 27 miles of conveyors, was worked over by 2,613 machines
and tools, and emerged as brand-new refrigerators—packed, crated, and ready
for shipment.
What amazed the visitors was the fact that no human hands touched the
machines or steel while two gleaming-white refrigerators were being
produced each minute.
They were seeing automation in action.7
Automation was also seen as foretelling the imminent end of labor unions, which
had stood up for workers’ rights in the past. It is impossible for labor to organize
the machines.8
Surveys of workers show a sudden shift around the time of the 1957–58 and
1960–61 twin recessions. Public opinion analyst Samuel Lubell, famous for his
success at predicting election outcomes, wrote during the slow economy in 1959
between the two recessions:
In the Spring of 1958 when I conducted a survey of how the public felt about
the recession relatively few persons talked of automation, even as a cause of
unemployment.
Currently every third or fourth worker one interviews is likely to cite some
case history, drawn from personal experience, of workers displaced by
machinery.
Often the tag line to these stories is the rueful comment, “Some men will
never get back their jobs.” Some say, “It’s only the beginning.”
The same gloomy prediction, “in two years a machine will be doing my
job,” was voiced by an elevator operator on Staten Island, an accountant in
Cleveland, a switchman in Youngstown and a railway clerk in Detroit.9
The twin recessions, the severest since the Great Depression, may have been
caused by reduced spending attendant on public fears about the future amidst the
automation scare. The 1957–58 recession was then dubbed “the automation
recession.”10
The 1957 motion picture The Desk Set,11 starring legendary actors Katharine
Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, is set at a company about to acquire an IBM
mainframe computer called Emerac. Hepburn plays the role of Bunny Watson, a
super-knowledgeable reference librarian for the company. Tracy plays Richard

Sumner, a computer engineer who is working on plans for the new computer. In
the course of the movie Richard falls in love with Bunny and proposes to her,
amidst tensions that he is working to destroy her livelihood. The movie notes
that an earlier computer has already automated payroll and eliminated many jobs
in the payroll department. Tension builds in the film when Emerac malfunctions
and sends out pink slips firing not only Bunny but also everyone in the whole
company. The mistake is later corrected.
The film shows the computer taking over some of the functions of the
company’s reference library by answering questions typed on a console. For
example, Emerac is asked, “What is the total weight of the earth?” Emerac
answers, “With or without people?” (I recently asked the voice-activated Google
Assistant, OK Google, the same question, and it answered matter-of-factly:
5.972 × 1024 kg.) Bunny then asks Emerac, “Should Bunny Watson marry
Richard Sumner?” Emerac answers, “No,” perhaps suggesting that the computer
was romantically involved with her creator. (I asked OK Google the same
question, and it responded by directing me to a 2011 New Yorker article, “Is I-
Pad the New Emerac?”)
Extensive concern about the dangers of automation continued into the 1960s.
In 1962, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions issued a report on
cybernation (a word that started to take off as a synonym for automation but
fizzled after the 1960s). The report concluded that:
Cybernation presages changes in the social system so vast and so different
from those with which we have traditionally wrestled that it will challenge to
their roots our current perceptions about the viability of our way of life. If our
democratic system has a chance to survive at all, we shall need far more
understanding of the consequences of cybernation.12
In 1963, labor leader George Meany tied a demand for a thirty-five-hour
workweek to concerns about automation. In 1964, US president Lyndon Johnson
signed into law during the presidential election a bill creating the National
Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. The
commission’s report13 was delayed until 1966, when the scare was mostly over.
The 1957–66 automation scare seemed to dissipate rather quickly, and for a
number of years. In 1965, the Wall Street Journal ran a story by Alfred L.
Malabre, Jr., titled “Automation Alarm Is Proving False.” The article noted that

people in 1965 seemed just to have forgotten about automation. Malabre found it
interesting that automation wasn’t even mentioned at a major United Auto
Workers labor convention in 1965. The article concluded, “The degree to which
this pessimism pervaded the leading councils of labor, the campus, the
Government and even management was, to say the least, extensive.”14