Visions Of Technology

Visions Of Technology: A Century Of Vital Debate About Machine Systems and the Human World. Edited by Richard Rhodes. New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Includes a selection from Archibald MacLeish's "The First Human Hope Industrialism Has Offered" (116-18) a variant title of or variation on his "Machines and the Future." Compare and contrast MacLeish here with a key passage in Karl Marx's "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry"; in MacLeish's words, at the end of the reprinted essay, "Changes from handicraft to machine production enormously increased output per worker and displaced thousands of men amid dire forebodings. But mechanization was still only an adjunct to human labor. As production increased with the manufacture of cheaper goods, employment also increased. Only now [in the 20th c.] has man become and adjunct, and an increasingly less important adjunct of the machine. Only in our time has an increase in production been possible with an actual decrease in the number of men employed. [This problem (interpolation in quoted text)] his the vital problem of our time and the … [ellipsis in quoted text] first human hope industialism has offered. Those who ignore the problem and those who discredit the hope do so at their peril" (Vision p. 118). See the unemployment issue for real-world referent in such works as K. Vonnegut's Player Piano and productivity discussion for real-world background for F. Pohl's "The Midas Plague."

Includes also readings from Henry Adams, probably "The Dynamo and the Virgin" retitled "Praying to the Dynamo"; Thorstein Veblen on "The Discipline of the Machine"; George Boas "In Defense of Machines" an Lewis Mumford on "The Machine Our Servant"; Dwight D. Eisenhower on "A Scientific-Technological Elite"; Jacques Ellul on "Science and Technology"; Marvin Minsky on "R. U. R. Revisited"; Joel Snell on […] Robotic Sex"; and at least two predictions of atomic weapons, one by H. G. Wells.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 30/V/17