Ronald Bailey: Were the Luddites Right After All?
In 1948 MIT cyberneticist Norbert Wiener wrote an urgent letter to Walter Reuther, head of the autoworkers union to warn him that modern computing technologies combined with manufacturing machinery would soon lead to disastrous unemployment. As post-Great Recession joblessness hovers around 8 percent, some neo-Luddite academicians are suggesting that the era of growing technological unemployment may finally have arrived. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey questions this new rage against the machines.