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On automation and technological change. From New York City Riverside radio in cooperation with the American assembly presents the first of four programs on automation and technological change. Program one considers the subject the promise and challenge of technology. With panelists Edwin F. SHELLY vice president of U.S. industries and Robert le Cashman professor of economics Barnard College. Now with some introductory comments here as your moderator I have our Ybor good associate professor of business Columbia University Dr. Burke. The challenge and promise of technology a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a Farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Those were the words of the fourth president of the United
States James Madison. Nearly a century and a half ago. They perhaps have even more relevance today when a substantial portion of the world's population lives in so-called people's democracies in relative Ingrid's of the outside world and indeed even of the happenings in their own countries. Access to Information is an essential feature of real democracy and one that was of great concern to President Eisenhower some time before he took office. Mr Eisenhower thought of a means for providing Americans with an opportunity to learn about discuss and make up their minds on important issues of the day. His idea materialized in the founding of the American assembly had Columbia University since its establishment. The assembly has brought up for public consideration 24 issues of national policy. The publication of authoritative Policy Studies meetings throughout the United States radio and television broadcasts. These have been the means by which the assembly has encouraged Americans to acquire information and express their opinions on current questions of public
policy. One such issue automation and technological change is the subject of this American assembly program. I am Ira Berg of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. With me to discuss the challenge and promise of technology I'm Mr. Edwin F. SHELLY vice president of U.S. industries a leading company in automation techniques and equipment. And Professor Robert Lowe Cashman professor of economics at Barnard College. In this the first of four discussions on the implications of automation and technological change we would seek to stake out the dimensions and the issues that have been buried under the strong statements of partisans concerned with the immediate and contemporary consequences of technological change. Because of the question I'd like to begin by asking you what you think in your judgment are some of the revolutionary promises of modern technology or perhaps we should ask. First whether there have been in recent times revolutionary changes
abroad in the land or whether there are indeed promises in the near and far future. This is not as easy a question to answer as said might seem we hear the Word automation around us rather steadily and yet it is possible to argue that at least since the great cluster of textile metallurgical steam powered inventions of the last poet of the 18th century we have seen nothing but continuous technological change. The real question is whether we're witnessing now some kind of a discrete break in the rate of char whether what we are observing is simply a continuation more Ladislaw away from myself although I feel very tentative about this. I think that so far the evidence is rather bad as that where continuing a trend found that we've broken a trend but we may be on the verge of breaking such a trend. Mr. Show me would you care to comment on the degree to which there has or has not
been or is about to be a major change in the promises of the US. I think. There may not be too much evidence yet outside of the. Technological laboratories of this country for a major change in productivity and a change therefore in the amount of goods and services that people can produce. But I think there's no question that there is a revolutionary change on the horizon and I think it may be coming very much more rapidly than most people anticipate. One of the indications of the kinds of changes that are coming about I think is the. Rate at which the technology has been developing not yet applied to industrial procedures but the rate at which the technology has been developing and the laboratories this country since the Second World War. We've seen
computers come of age in the last 15 years and grow to be a very substantial. Play a very substantial role in the in the automation of our processes. Probably we're right at the beginning really of the role that computers were playing at this technology were substantially unknown 15 years ago. Well similarly the linking up of four way manufacturing processes which heretofore have been linked up by human beings that is one production line will be making one part of an article another section the production line another part and all of these parts are joined together by people people walking back and forth people actually regulating the flow of goods that come out of each part of the production line. This function will begin to be taken over by computers and by computer controlled machinery as soon as computers get cheap enough to make it economically feasible to use them
rather than to use people for these for these purposes and home. Mad out of control and decision making in industrial processes is one that I think is due for a revolutionary change heretofore controlling decision making has been a prerogative of people in industrial situations. With the advent of much less expensive electronic circuitry and equipment this rug will be taken over more and more by electronic equipment and we will see a much greater increase in productivity there for the few remaining people and each production line than we've seen in the past. If I might just ask a question on what you said. Do you feel the day's developments are feasible in a greater degree and the whole area of services teaching medical care. They are a of non commodity production which we have been moving for a long time.
Well yes I think that we've already seen some considerable increase in productivity in these fields and I think we'll see increasing the rate at which productivity goes up here. You mention the service industries in general. There are entire worldwide hotel airplane train reservation systems being operated with computers at this point so that a family behind each clerk at a at a counter facing a pub. There were many clerks doing all of the routine functions that had to be done to make large scale transportation hotel travel systems work now there are very few people in some of the systems behind the clerks at the desk facing the public their practice back with nothing but machines behind these quacks so it's begun to make an impact there. In medicine there is an indication up that we're going to put new doctors out of work because we've always been I think chronically short of doctors but
that we're going to certainly improve the diagnostic capabilities of the average doctor and improve the treatment facilities of the average laboratory by mechanizing an awful lot of the information and decision making based on this information. And this is this has started already a number of hospitals around the country where diagnoses are actually made on the basis of information fed into computing networks and where the. Our service is of a distant specialist can be brought to bear on a particular case simply by transmitting to him or wires what the symptoms are transmitting cartographic readings and so forth. Well I think you've demonstrated at least by argument fairly effectively that the promises will be great in medicine but I must confess some restiveness as to whether the other things you mentioned necessarily constitute a promise. Rather than let us say a threat could we look forward for example to faster
data processing and linear programming devices and data processing machinery and systems analyses and simulation devices and programs and so on would necessarily bring us better decisions more rational decisions. Are we likely to be. To be more threatened than helped by the sudden burst. Well probably bring us more rapid decisions nine times out of 10 that's an advantage that you are really asking I suppose I have or whether we're not in for a repetition of a civilian for and have experience of military technology which as far as how Ron our confidence and a capacity of political leaders really do control that decision process. This would be one concern certainly. Where else might we see some promise in the revolution that you've described and with which Professor the coachman's expressed some reservations. Medicine and decision making are there other promises that are likely to to grow out of
an age of rapid technological change. Well it seems to me that promise and of course the threat is inextricably bound up with the promise I'm going to have to do something to realize the promise and to eliminate the threat. But the promise was about the fact that we are. More and more rapidly I think getting to the point where we can produce all of the basic goods and services that we require even for our affluent society without much human labor to do all this which means in effect that we have pretty much an unlimited abundance available to us. We can look forward to a constantly increasing abundance. This is not a two pronged effect a kind of an elimination of drudgery at the same time the limits of population group from a viable role in the society. Well it eliminates what used to be the major source of income and livelihood for most
people namely the routine repetitive machine like tasks and I think that they will not. It will simply not be economical to use people for such machinelike tasks. Whether we're talking about five years from now or 10 years now 15 years from now perhaps isn't too important just at this point. But there's no doubt that there will come a time in the relatively near future when you won't be able to use people to compete with machines and machine like jobs so that the threat as I understand it is what do we do with all these people that aren't going to be able to occupy themselves and be paid for doing machinelike jobs and there is no opportunity in there said you know the opportunity is really for a genuinely humane society such as yours. No community has ever realize that community or a society which has time for a personal cultivation of the problem and the personal solicitude it seems to me that we have to shift from the areas in which the machines and the computers can do better than human beings to
the areas I'm now assuming there are some where human beings can do better than computers and machines. I think that's precisely so I think that the threat really can be a great promise and we can use people for things that in the old days very few people were able to do. We talk about research and we talk about exploration. We talk about things that formally were reserved to a very few people who are very highly educated and yet there's really no reason that people cannot be educated to a much higher degree than they are at the present time. I think perhaps a couple hundred couple hundred years ago we were still living. You know semi futile situation nobody could dream that every man in the street 200 years later would be able to operate such a complicated vehicle as an automobile. I mean you know most people can run the chariots at that point. And what we've done is we've raised the entire level of the culture bit by bit so that now
we take for granted the fact that every kid that comes out of elementary school has enough interest in it from the way already with an internal combustion engine to operate an automobile and do something about if it breaks down. What you've suggested as the show suggests to me that we may be in for a needed invitation to be presented to such as Professor Cashman a revolution in economic thinking. Is there any evidence as you read the history of economic thought after all this is your field suggesting that one of the places in which both the threat and the challenge are greatest is in the area of thought economics being based traditionally on conceptions of scarcity. Now Mr. Shelley is telling us that there's an opportunity for. Abundance and diversity and opportunity what would you say to those. I think I think the greatest obstacle towards grasping the opportunities that technology is offering us are what
Galbraith very aptly called the conventional wisdom in these things and the conventional wisdom in these things. Arguments I think that the present pattern of production is a pattern which must persist that the present arrangement of institutional responsibilities for education and employment must be the one that's going to persist. I think we need some kind of a break. I think the guy breaks himself right in the right direction and the affluent society when he pointed out that the link between income and work is not as close in an economy of abundance and all high goods producing economy as it always has been in the past when scarcity ruled the roost. But I think it was effective perhaps in not perceiving the importance of regular work to most human beings income is not enough.
I think for most human beings feeling a specific contribution is necessary to a contribution I think is a good way to put it it doesn't have to be work in the sense that were accustomed to thinking of work. So where you leave it no morning come back tired at 6 o'clock at night and we have a history of it's usually called the Puritan ethic that says I should come home tired after eight or ten hours you haven't worked. Obviously if we can do things which are socially useful even though they don't happen to occupy those hours and make you tired who are performing a useful function I think your word contribution is important if we can arrange for people to make contributions to the economy society this is required and this is necessary and it's also sufficient to make the people satisfied and to make the society useful I think one of the contributions that can be made is the development of the education. How each individual in the society. We have obviously more complicated
economic society that we're dealing with and you have to be better and better trained and educated in order to do a job in that society but it seems to me Similarly we have a much more complicated political society that we've got to live in. And again in the old days it was sufficient maybe to have an elementary school education in order to run our political democracy. But now if we were still to have a democracy if the electorate was to make the ultimate decisions which is what a democracy is all about the electorate has to be educated you know sufficiently high browed manner so that the electorate can make intelligent decisions and are more and more complicated political. I don't agree with you more at I'm in the odd position of completely agreeing with the businessman I'm almost never in that situation. I think one of the beauties of our society has been that we take an enlarged view of human comparison days. Suppose you were going to do something specific about what sort of thing could you think about.
It seems to me that we have two great problems in our society today and if we could solve those in a manner that's mutually compatible we might come up with a great new capability of devoting our resources in this era to improving society as a whole we have on the one hand the constant nagging problem of unemployment and rising unemployment. Let's face it stemming largely from the fact that productivity keeps increasing. For that matter the size of the labor force keeps increasing. And yet because of the fact that a given number of workers can produce more and more goods and services every year we find each year there are a few less people actually required to maintain our affluent society even to maintain a growing society. Of course there are adequate growth economic growth rate can catch up with the productivity increase and with the population growth and so forth we'd be in good shape in practice this doesn't seem to be occurring. In practice it seems likely that over the next 10 years perhaps there will be more and more people
not required in the labor force to produce all of our goods and services. This is the one big problem. The other big problem is that we talk about education of a higher and deeper and broader nature for all of the electorate we talk about education throughout life to make people. Are able to handle the economic and political problems they're confronted with. But there's no mechanism for providing education once the citizen is past the age of 17 the fees are 18 and he's gone through high school or 22 or 23 if he's going through college. It seems to me that if we would combine these two problems by deliberately dividing the increases in productivity each year to the education of our electorate our citizens if you will that we could solve both problems simultaneously and I think that there is a specific way in which this might be done. We've talked in the last month or so in
various forums about the possibility of setting up a national system of educational leave the way this would work would simply be that we would determine at the present time say we have a 5 percent unemployment. We would take 5 percent of the existing labor force 5 percent of the employed people out of the labor force. For a moment let's just put them on the shelf that will get back to what we do with them and we then create the kind of labor shortage that we had during and after World War Two which swept all of the people who wanted jobs into the labor force no problem by getting jobs very well probably about retraining or very little difficulty with mobility of labor with area redevelopment. The big problem was where we get people to work in our factories and our. Service Organization. So if we can create this labor shortage I think we've taken a big step towards ensuring that anybody who wants a job has one. Now we have 5 percent of the people we've taken out of the labor force. Well I'd like to suggest is that we
do this in a special way we say that once somebody has worked for 20 years he's earned one year of educational leave that's 5 percent. And during that year he gets paid his salary under a national system and he takes a year of education particularly suitably geared to his requirements. Maybe he gets educated for nine months and gets three months for his leisure vacation his rabbi and often wouldn't call the requirements of his fulfilling role as a citizen with appropriate political economic and social learning. Yes I think that we can do a lot towards getting some basic political understanding of some basic economics and some basic. Technological understanding about the world a balun into people who have been out in the world for quite a few years and have a different attitude from people I have not. I say add that speaking as what is laughingly called an educator I find I find this really exciting sort of thing to challenge
too. It's really a challenge to see whether you can educate everybody continuingly I think you can and I'm with you I'm with you on it presumably solves in part the problem of the new leisure unquote. That would be produced or made possible in a society that moves rapidly towards the incorporation of the new devices techniques technologies that you've been talking about. It would certainly improve our use of leisure and it would improve the ability of people who are retiring to do something useful with their lives but I think more important it would make it possible for us to constantly stimulate the economy the demand if you will in the economy by broadening the outlook of people who make up the economy I think traditionally Bob it's been true that the more education people have the greater their demands are the wider their interests are the more things they want. So that we would at the same time be stimulating the demand in the economy each year so to speak and also making it possible to do.
To increase productivity more and more rapidly without suffering unemployment is something I'm sure prefers the question I would be in favor of anything that increases the functions and demands for education in the system but I was wondering apart from the euphoria we would both experience of if we could be king of all this. Where do you see some political and institutional barriers to the implementation of this very unique very imaginative very inventive course of action. Sure. I mean that the barriers really can be put. It's all institutions recess no idea. I think it's very important frankly that this idea comes from a businessman because I would expect the business community to be the most recessed and single factor of our bar total communal day for us. I also believe with the Canucks that in the long run only ideas are influential.
I think the business community if I may speak in defense of the general image from now on is more and more aware of the fact that it is not a community or by itself that the business community isn't going to operate satisfactory unless the entire political economic community operates satisfactory so I think there will be in some respects less opposition to the necessary and revolutionary certainly evolutionary change in our educational policies and our use of citizens from the business community than perhaps from some other segments of the community that don't realize yet how closely their welfare is bound up with the solution of the problems of the entire political economic business. One of our general need to solve at least two other problems the problems of what we're going to do with the aid to religious schools and what we're going to do with racial segregation. This goes this goes right in with as we couldn't do a national plan of the kind you imagine that way suggested unless we straighten
this sort of thing out. The problem two of those groups who under the arrangements Mr. Scheuer described would not necessarily be covered for example women who typically wouldn't earn the 20 years of work time that would qualify them for a nationally. Sponsored educational leave. Yes as a teacher or as a teacher of young women of course. That group occurs to me instantly. I would hesitate to give women a preference but perhaps we could cut down the considerations by our much a we might give them the educational credit for shorter periods of unemployment. You seem to give them some credit for raising their children. Yeah not only relevant economic function is that do you see any specific ways in which your program would permit this kind of flexibility that is is there something that you want to support it would develop out of the plan. Well I think that one of the great things that could develop of course would be the full employment
economy which if you had is a continuing affair would provide the buoyancy needed to make investment in education even if it wasn't specifically covered on the plan and not guarantee that a woman could work if she were to re-enter the workforce with some retraining. This would make a point as to pay for the greatest motivation. If you're going to apply just to take a sample if you're going to apply this to educators to some of the women will find jobs very Rabelais while the educators are taking their year off at the end of your year service. How optimistic are you Mr. Shelley that the revolution in thinking the both of you have alluded to will in fact take place. I think that it has to take place and therefore the risk of being labeled a hopeless optimist I think it will take place I think our society in the last 200 years since certainly we started the American democracy we have in our society lived up to every challenge that we've been faced with
and we've been able to adapt ourselves and I think there are great indications now that we're going to adapt ourselves to the present tremendous challenge of automation. Well Mr Cashin Would you agree with that that it would be possible to anticipate these problems and act on them before they develop into higher orders of unemployment perpetuation of. The kind of inequalities that aggravate the problem among minority groups and I'm a trifle less optimistic than Ed is on theirs but still optimistic because I think that it's the self interest of every major group to do exactly what you have been suggesting. Well I think we've about come full circle. Gentleman we had a moment of disagreement at the outset and came all the way around two degrees of optimism over the long pole and I'd like to thank you Edwin F. SHELLY vice president of U.S. industries and Robert location professor of economics at Barnard College for telling us about some of the challenges and promises of modern
technology. This has been the first of a series of 4 1/2 hour broadcasts on automation and technological change presented by the American assembly at Columbia University. The second program of the series will be automation unemployment. A h Raskin of the editorial board of The New York Times and Professor Eli Ginzberg of the Columbia Graduate School of Business will be guests of the American assembly. From New York City Riverside radio in cooperation with the American assembly has presented the first of four recorded radio discussions on automation and technological change. Heard today discussing the promise and challenge of technology. Well Robert like Cashman professor of economics Barnard College and Edwin actually Vice President of U.S. industry whose moderator was I bar Ybor good associate professor of business Columbia University. This is the national educational radio network.
Series
Automation and technological change
Episode
The promise and challenge of technology
Producing Organization
WRVR (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-pn8xfd7z
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Description
Episode Description
This program discusses "the challenge and promise of technology" and how changing technology might impact society.
Series Description
Discussions of the implications of automation and technological change.
Broadcast Date
1964-07-30
Topics
Technology
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:29:28
Embed Code
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Credits
Host: Berg, Ivar E.
Panelist: Shelley, Edwin F.
Panelist: La Cashman, Robert
Producing Organization: WRVR (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 64-33-1 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:29:20
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Citations
Chicago: “Automation and technological change; The promise and challenge of technology,” 1964-07-30, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-pn8xfd7z.
MLA: “Automation and technological change; The promise and challenge of technology.” 1964-07-30. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-pn8xfd7z>.
APA: Automation and technological change; The promise and challenge of technology. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-pn8xfd7z