Robert Theobald on automation and guaranteed income on CBC Ideas 1996 and 1965

Robert Theobald did a 3-part series in 1996 on the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program “IDEAS”. Parts were taken from a 10-part series done in 1965 for CBC by Theobald. The transcript was available on CBC IDEAS online archive until approx 2007. It is no longer online but you can find the complete text via Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/old-ideas/theo.html (the old link)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070307080611/http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/old-ideas/theo.html (web archive Wayback Machine link)

Theobald audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUTwZUHJRTI

Excerpts:

“It was clear to Robert Theobald, and others, that automation and cybernation – that is, the large-scale use of computers and robots to do repetitive clerical, or heavy and dangerous work (in automotive plants, for example) – these machine systems were going to make lots of clerical and industrial jobs disappear. Theobald thought that society was headed for a situation where “the lower classes” were largely unemployed; the living standard of the middle class would be adequate, but their participation in public life would be minimal; and the top managers, in both business and politics, were going to be overworked to the point of distraction.He thought that the usual ways of distributing wealth in the United States were outmoded. Grudging welfare to the jobless was inefficient and demeaning – and besides everybody in the population was needed as an active consumer if the newly efficient, automated industrial system was going to thrive. He suggested a radical way to accomplish this: what he called the guaranteed annual income.The nightmare future, beloved of science fiction writers, where machines ran everything was not inevitable, Theobald argued. This was how he put it in one of the 1965 programs.TAPE: The drift into a dehumanized society is not necessary. Obviously our technological power could be used to support a better world… 7:29 …an infinitely better world than any we’ve ever known.”

“But there’s another way that income distribution might work, the so-called “guaranteed annual income.” It was an idea that was hot in the sixties, and Robert Theobald was one of its main intellectual “fathers”. Today this idea has disappeared entirely from public discussion. You’ll hear how it might work as this series develops, in essays by Robert Theobald and discussions he had with his colleagues who were wondering, in the sixties, how to survive the evolving future. Then, unlike now, there was a sense that you could look the facts in the face, and actually do something to control the course of events. And there was a vigorous public discussion of ideas. Here’s Robert Theobald with Donald Michaels of the University of Michigan, author of a string of books including “Cybernation–The Silent Conquest,” and “The Unprepared Society."”