Dawn of the automatic age

It’s Labor Day, that pleasant late-summer holiday when capital eats the hamburgers that labor cooks. To mark the occasion, here’s a brief excerpt from The Glass Cage that describes the origins of automation after the Second World War:

The word automation entered the language onlyrecently. It was first utteredin 1946, when engineers at the Ford Motor Company neededa new term to describe the latest machinery being installed on the company’s assembly lines. “Give us some more of that automatic...