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Yeah, the "automation" they used to talk about so optimistically in the sixties, which was going to provide all this additional leisure time... really didn't work out that way.
Me and the robot working away
He looks at me, as if to say
"I'll be doing your job someday"
I'm stuck on the treadmill
- Richard Thompson, "Stuck on the Treadmill"
Again, just talking about how these topics were already being actively discussed back in the '50s (in fact, they were issues as far back as the 19th Century and even the 18th Century when the Industrial Revolution started), the same schism that you touch on - will automation take all our jobs or will automation improve our lives by freeing us from work and drudgery to pursue more interesting activities - always existed side by side.
In the 1950s novel "No Down Payment -" not an optimistic book - the feared technology then was transistors, "electronics" and "computing," in general, and atomic power - with most worrying about mass unemployment only a few years to a decade out (the 1960s) while one hopeful scientist sees all this new technology making life massively easier while greatly reducing the need for work.
Yeah, tell me about it! I spent my childhood going over the rosy future as forecast in the pages of Dad's National Geographic Magazine and thinking what a great future I was going to have. Still waiting for all those vacations to the moon that I was going to take or racing down a futuristic highway in a fancy car while reading the papers.
One vision of MY (!) future as shown in the pages of the Sept. 1969 issue.
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Great images. Well, I guess the good thing about growing up with my Dad is he did not have an optimistic view of the future and dismissed things like predictions of vacation to the moon and a work-free future as nonsense. I assumed life would be hard as I was told it was often.