PUSH-BUTTON FACTORY — SHALLENBERGER 249 



One of the most challenging aspects of automation is its effect on 

 job skills and job satisfactions. In the past, technology has tended 

 to degrade skills. The turret lathe and the automatic screw machine, 

 for example, replaced skilled journeymen lathe operators with rel- 

 atively unskilled machine tenders. The war brought about an even 

 greater simplification of jobs and decrease in job skills. Norbert 

 Wiener has written pointedly, "It is a degradation to a human being 

 to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is 

 an almost equal degradation to assign him purely repetitive tasks in 

 a factory which demand less than a millionth of his brain power." 



Further automation may reverse this trend. Gwilym Price is re- 

 ported to have said at the Corning Seminar on "Living in Industrial 

 Civilization," "Unskilled work is a mistake in engineering." Automa- 

 tion could remedy that mistake, could replace large numbers of un- 

 skilled and semiskilled workers with a relatively few highly trained 

 technicians, whose function it would be to keep these fabulous and ex- 

 pensive machines operating. But what happens to those who are 

 displaced, those who have neither the aptitudes nor training to be 

 technicians ? In past years the expanding economy which technology 

 created has always absorbed those who were displaced. But this 

 took place during periods of decreasing skill requirements. Can the 

 worker displaced by automation fill the highly skilled jobs which 

 automation creates? Henry Ford is reputed to have said that a 

 whole stratum of humanity was unfit for anything but repetitive 

 assembly-line work. Modern psychology disputes this. Such workers 

 may well be the product of the mechanized factory, not a justification 

 for monotonous, repetitive assignments. 



Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we will always have many 

 semiautomatic and nonautomatic plants which will employ large 

 numbers of unskilled and semiskilled workers on routine jobs. Auto- 

 mation will result in increased leisure and an increased proportion 

 of the national income available for luxury spending, and thus create 

 new job opportunities in these nonautomatic industries. This in turn 

 raises the most challenging question of all — have we the intelligence, 

 the character, the maturity to use our added leisure constructively? 



Perhaps the other side of the problem is more serious. Will we be 

 able to find and train the skilled technicians to supervise, service, tool, 

 and maintain this highly complex equipment? We already have a 

 severe shortage of technical skills. But is this not the result of our 

 failure to utilize the aptitudes already available to us? Industry 

 has much to learn from recent experience of the military in both 

 aptitude testing and mass training to high technical skills. We have 

 much to learn also on creating the incentives which will induce the 

 worker to develop these higher skills, incentives which have largely 



