Automation

Cybernetics as a philosophy of society, not just engineering. Wiener saw that feedback loops govern organisations, economies, and minds decades before anyone used the word "systems thinking." This is the most readable en…

Ellul's central claim is that technique — the ensemble of means oriented toward efficiency — has become an autonomous system that shapes human ends rather than serving them. The argument is extreme and deliberately uncom…

Marchant's 1955 Broadway play dramatises the arrival of a computer system—'EMMARAC'—into a television network's research department, where a team of expert women librarians fear replacement by the machine. Written at the…

Peter George's 1958 thriller, written under the pseudonym Peter Bryant, dramatised what systems theorists were only beginning to articulate: that sufficiently complex sociotechnical systems can fail catastrophically thro…

Burdick and Wheeler wrote this novel at the precise moment when automated military command systems were outpacing the human judgment meant to govern them—a structural problem that has never left us. The central catastrop…

The first machine age augmented physical force; the second augments cognitive capacity. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that we are at an inflection point where digital technologies begin doing for mental work what the ste…

A rigorous theoretical framework on the competition between automation (which displaces labour) and the creation of new tasks (which generates employment). Acemoglu and Restrepo offer the analytical counterweight to Bryn…

Brynjolfsson draws a clean distinction between AI that substitutes (automation) and AI that augments (augmentation). When AI imitates the human and replaces them, workers lose bargaining power and value concentrates. Whe…