The latter essay was a minor masterpiece of corporate humanist technophilia. The new machinery, the authors conceded, “may well loose waves of temporary unemployment” and “degrade the worker to an unskilled and tradeless nonentity”—prices for progress that Fortune considered well worth paying. Besides, the automated factory outstripped human beings in existential and well as productive superiority: machines could, in their words, “see better than eyes, calculate more reliably than brains, communicate faster and farther than the voice, record more accurately than memory.”12 Automation would
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