In it, the king of automation made some optimistic predictions about machines creating more jobs than they take away—in retrospect, very prescient.

1940s

In 1940, the President of MIT, Karl Compton and President Franklin D. Roosevelt clashed over the question.

As chronicled by the Times, the president of MIT didn’t see a problem whereas the nation’s president did. The same year a US senator suggested a tax on machines to offset the unemployment they may cause.

“Who will have the last laugh in the gadget age — man or machine?,” asked Pulitzer Prize-winning AP writer Hal Boyle in 1949. “Well, the machine is already giving a preliminary oily chuckle. For it is gaining… gaining….. gaining on mankind.”

1950s

The 1950s kicked off with concern in the UK over a “robot revolution,” and stateside there were calls for a congressional investigation of automation, with an eye toward averting—you guessed it—mass job loss.

A 1957 Times article, “Promise and Peril of Automation,” actually gave a balanced look at the debate, but the illustration was decidedly more ominous.

President Dwight Eisenhower dismissed popular fears of automation in 1955, calling them groundless, saying the same fears had “plagued people for 15o years and always proved groundless.”

1960s

When Kennedy was elected in 1960, before he had even been sworn in, there were calls for him to tackle the issue of technological unemployment.

The piece begins, “A leading business economist today urged president-elect Kennedy to call a conference on unemployment caused by technological change and automation as soon as he got settled in the White House.”

A year later, in 1961, Time magazine ran an article titled “The Automation Jobless,” which begins, “The rise in unemployment has raised some new alarms around an old scare word: automation. How much has the rapid spread of technological change contributed to the current high of 5,400,000 out of work?”

The hysteria escalated from there:

In 1963, a Manhattan Democrat urged that a full-time federal commission to study the threats and effects of automation be put in place.

The Kennedy administration was less forgiving than Eisenhower’s. The US Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz warned millions of workers would end up on a “slag heap,” even in prosperous times.

And a Cornell professor warned that “elements of a potential revolutionary confrontation growing out of automation are already present.”