The 1960s Automation Freak-Out

By James Pethokoukis of AEI.

"Fears that machines will eat all the jobs are nothing new. In a recent Substack essay, “Technological Progress and the Meaning of Work,” economists Soumitra Shukla of the Burning Glass Institute and Alex Imas of Google DeepMind outline the history of worker anxiety from the Luddites in the early Industrial Revolution to Hollywood creatives here in the early days of the AI Revolution.

Shukla and Imas also touch upon a period of concern about impending mass automation and mass unemployment that’s pretty much forgotten, at least among the general public. But I wrote about it in my 2023 book The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised and in an essay for my own Substack newsletter.

Let us journey back to a tech-optimistic period I call Up Wing 1.0, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. So basically the Atomic Age and the Space Age. But all that obvious progress had a downside. In February 1961, Time magazine reported that the “rise in unemployment has raised some new alarms around an old scare word: automation. How much has the rapid spread of technological change contributed to the current high of 5,400,000 out of work?”

Time returned to the theme with a 1965 cover story on computers: “At least for now, the computer seems to raise almost as many problems as it solves. The most pressing and practical one is, of course, displacement of the work force.”

Washington took note. On August 19, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill creating the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. In his remarks on the commission, Johnson didn’t seem all that worried about technological unemployment as long as government planned for the inevitable disruption it would cause. Keep in mind that this was a peak period of policymaker confidence in government’s ability to manage the American economy through fiscal and monetary policy:

Automation is not our enemy. Our enemies are ignorance, indifference, and inertia. Automation can be the ally of our prosperity if we will just look ahead, if we will understand what is to come, and if we will set our course wisely after proper planning for the future. . . . The techniques of automation are already permitting us to do many things that we simply could not do otherwise. Some of our largest industries, some of our largest employers would not exist and could not operate without automation, and some of those employers are here this morning. . . . We could not provide our great shield for the security of this country and the shield for the security of the free world if we did not have automation in the United States. If we understand it, if we plan for it, if we apply it well, automation will not be a job destroyer or a family displaced. Instead, it can remove dullness from the work of man and provide him with more than man has ever had before.

Others wanted a more vigorous response. The left-wing Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution warned Johnson that “cybernation” had produced “a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” The capability of machines, it argued, was rising more rapidly than the capacity of many human beings to keep pace. It wanted federal action such as a guaranteed income and government licensing power “to regulate the speed and direction of cybernation to minimize hardship.” Martin Luther King Jr., philosophically in tune with the group, warned of “automation and cybernation” in his final Sunday sermon on March 31, 1968.

Oddly, this was all happening during a time when productivity and pay were tightly linked—and both were rising. The jobs alarm was being sounded at the very same time a fast-growing economy was grinding down joblessness to levels not seen again until the 1990s tech boom. (When unemployment finally rose in the 1970s, it coincided with a productivity slowdown.)

Here again, we are at a time of low unemployment and spiking fears about automation. Maybe history has a lesson for the automation worriers."