The Automation Bogy

Since liberalism has a long agenda of needed action, it is crucial that we put the important items first, and not be diverted by imaginary bogiemen. Criers of alarm— notable among them Don Michael, Mary Alice Hilton, Robert Heilbroner, and now Ben Seligman—preaching cybernation and the Triple Revolution, have sought a place for automation toward the top of the agenda. They picture for us a future in which we must choose between eating to the vomiting point (although, since we shall be jobless, we won’t be able to buy food) or droning through our days in the boredom of unwanted leisure.

Ben Seligman is unpersuaded, I take it, that the arguments presented in my Shape of Automation show that this picture is wrong, and that ...