Robots have been about to take all the jobs for more than 200 years
Is it really different this time?
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Technology has always triggered fears of mass unemployment. In 1811 it was the Luddites, who assumed they were done for. In the 1930s, it was vaunted economist John Maynard Keynes, who implicated technology as one reason for the unemployment of the Great Depression.
The same persistent fear has been playing out in the pages of newspapers for the last century:
1920s
In 1921, The New York Times featured a book review titled “Will Machines Devour Man?,” accompanied by an illustration of a person being fed into a sausage grinder (bottom right).
An illustration titled “A Vision of the Machine Age” (above left) depicted thousands of people cowering under huge mechanical cogs, like so many worker ants.
Illustrations of long unemployment lines and factories bellowing smoke (above) accompanied another Times article, which blamed automation for workers’ “idle hands.”
1930s
Even geniuses weren’t immune from the temptation to scapegoat technology. Albert Einstein blamed machines for the joblessness of the 1930s.
So did the economist John Maynard Keynes, who coined a phrase for the phenomenon. “We are being afflicted with a new disease,” he wrote, “‘technological unemployment.’”
It was the perfect term, at the perfect time, for the perfect scapegoat. Use of “technological unemployment” exploded.
If you compare the unemployment rate (left) with the term’s frequency of usage in the Times (right), the anxiety is evident: when the unemployment rate spikes, so does use of the term.
By 1939 the term was common place, even though employment was rising at a steady pace. Henry Ford was moved to write an op-ed in The New York Times World’s Fair edition of that year, defending machines and automation.
In it, the king of automation made some optimistic predictions about machines creating more jobs than they take away—in retrospect, very prescient.
1940s
In 1940, the President of MIT, Karl Compton and President Franklin D. Roosevelt clashed over the question.
As chronicled by the Times, the president of MIT didn’t see a problem whereas the nation’s president did. The same year a US senator suggested a tax on machines to offset the unemployment they may cause.
“Who will have the last laugh in the gadget age — man or machine?,” asked Pulitzer Prize-winning AP writer Hal Boyle in 1949. “Well, the machine is already giving a preliminary oily chuckle. For it is gaining… gaining….. gaining on mankind.”
1950s
The 1950s kicked off with concern in the UK over a “robot revolution,” and stateside there were calls for a congressional investigation of automation, with an eye toward averting—you guessed it—mass job loss.
A 1957 Times article, “Promise and Peril of Automation,” actually gave a balanced look at the debate, but the illustration was decidedly more ominous.
President Dwight Eisenhower dismissed popular fears of automation in 1955, calling them groundless, saying the same fears had “plagued people for 15o years and always proved groundless.”
1960s
When Kennedy was elected in 1960, before he had even been sworn in, there were calls for him to tackle the issue of technological unemployment.
The piece begins, “A leading business economist today urged president-elect Kennedy to call a conference on unemployment caused by technological change and automation as soon as he got settled in the White House.”
A year later, in 1961, Time magazine ran an article titled “The Automation Jobless,” which begins, “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?”
The hysteria escalated from there:
In 1963, a Manhattan Democrat urged that a full-time federal commission to study the threats and effects of automation be put in place.
The Kennedy administration was less forgiving than Eisenhower’s. The US Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz warned millions of workers would end up on a “slag heap,” even in prosperous times.
And a Cornell professor warned that “elements of a potential revolutionary confrontation growing out of automation are already present.”
The escalating hysteria prompted famous business guru Peter Drucker to write an article in 1965 defending automation…
…which ran with this illustration, satirizing how automation was being framed.
In 1967, a book titled Man in the Age of Automation was published. The New York Times review, titled “Man Versus Machine,” began with a telling hint as to the discourse around automation at the time.
1970s
The hysteria of the 1960s seemed to have burned itself out, but near the end of the 1970s, fears began to grow again, this time around the threat of computer chips. In 1978, UK Prime Minister James Callaghan enlisted a think tank to investigate:
1980s
By the 1980s, the computer fear cycle was in full swing. The New York Times started the decade with a warning:
It snowballed from there.
Just as Einstein and Keynes had thought in the 1930s, things were different this time.
There were renewed calls for hearings into robots, automation and job loss.
1990s
As the new millennium approached, fear of automation and computers seemed to all but disappear from the pages of the press (judging from New York Times and Google newspaper archives), perhaps due to a booming economy and fascination with tech’s—particularly the web’s—possiblities
2000s
After the dot-com crash the economy took a hit, and positive attitudes towards technology did too. In July of 2000, Alan Greenspan gave a warning:
The decade finished with this Atlantic piece:
2010s
With the advent of self-driving cars and consumer facing A.I., the fear of automation is once again at a fever pitch.
Is it different this time? Or are we giving in to the same fear of technological change and progress as people have for the last century?
Thanks to Maham Javaid for research assistance
