A MECHANISED WORLD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21992, 29 June 1933, Page 6

A MECHANISED WORLD

Increasing mechanisation in every form of activity directed by human hands and brains has made the world apprehensive. While unemployment persists, new inventions and refinements of earlier inventions are continually being marketed, the successful introduction of which may involve the displacement of workmen by a machine. The " technocrats," that intense American sect whose statistical voices were heard loudly declaiming recently but are now, apparently, stilled, achieved one interesting if rather futile gesture with their energy surveys, establishing by irrefutable figures the amount of present unemployment that is due to mechanisation.' In the United States, they demonstrated, the peak of employment antedated by some years the peak of productivity, and recently employment has declined more rapidly than the rate of production. This conclusion is admitted by Professor T. E. Gregory, who has engaged recently in a discussion in the Spectator on the subject "Is Mechanisation a Danger?" But Professor Gregory takes an optimistic view of the world's steady development of substitutes for manpower. He allows that the immediate consequences are, allied with other conditions, to throw people out of work. On the other hand, he argues, machinery has made life more endurable not only for the moneyed classes but also for the masses. It is significant, he says,,that the era of mechanisation is coincident with the era of working-class emancipation, for " until machinery and the use of mechanical power came to the aid of man . . . slavery and serfdom in one or other of their many forms was the fate of the great majority of mankind." Seasonable expenditure of effort is beneficial, " but a world without machinery and without mechanical power would mean an intolerable slavery for those who could survive in it." Even the class of person who is thoroughly demoralised at the thought of a world turned mechanical must confess that this argument has much to commend it. The idealist who longs for the " simple life " would probably prefer to use machine-made matches to light his campfire, rather than be put to the necessity of rubbing two sticks together. Then, Professor Gregory claims, it is not fair to assume that labour displaced from a certain task by machines must remain idle, or be pushed into inferior marginal occupations. The mechanised world differs in kind, not in degree, from the primitive world, and creates its own demands. Work of all kinds which would be impossible without mechanical power is offered. Some of the most widely-used and beneficial inventions —the telegraph, for instance — have not displaced labour at all, while as the result of inventions and scientific discoveries vast new industries have been established. The view taken by most literary men is, of course, that the mechanisation of the world is destroying humanity. Mr Aldous Huxley's detached comment on modern trends, if they arc permitted to*extend to their logical conclusion, is to envisage a " brave new world " in which babies are reared in bottles and " conditioned " to suit the sphere of life for

which they are intended. D. H. Law-

rence passionately declaimed against artificial " civilisation: " Tin people! It's all a steady sort of Bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical, thing." Others besides Professor Gregory, however, will permit themselves a smile at the pretensions of literary men who, he suggests, " sigh for the days when they could have cultivated their gardens Avith the sole aid of their t»c and finger-nails, first because they possessed no other gardening tools, and secondly, because they possessed no scissors." While many economists deplore mechanisation on more practical grounds, there are others among (hose trained in economic thought who can perceive great good in the continuation of the process. If unemployment in the accepted industries does continue to increase, it is suggested, capital will increase too, and as society becomes richer through mechanisation a continually increasing number of persons will be available for State employment: for, as one writer has said, the rendering of those skilled personal services which are "the very badge and index of a high standard, of civilisation."