3 ms·

Highly relevant: Pohl's "The Midas Plague" <https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_1954_04?view=theater#page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/

• 082349872349872 3y ago
  Just as a comment-by-anecdote on how I think the world looked in 1954: I was once eating a sandwich when an elderly man struck up a conversation with me, as he noticed I was reading something either by or about Norbert Wiener*. It turned out this fellow had made his pile in the 1950s by automating bowling alleys, then nearly lost it again by trying —as a classical second system— to automate restaurants a bit later. These days we think of the Jetsons as a future-that-never-was, but in 1954 I think they would have seen it as a future-that-plausibly-could-be. * compare "at your service" (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBCND6sY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBCND6sY8 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings (1950)