Lesson 56 The Age of Automation自动化时代

science and technology have come to pervade every aspect of our lives and, as a result, society is

changing at a speed which is quite unprecedented. There is a great technological explosion around

us, generated by science. This explosion is already freeing vast numbers of people from their

traditional bondage to nature, and now at last we have it in our power to free mankind once and for

all from the fear which is based on want. Now, for the first time, man can reasonably begin to think

that life can be something more than a grim struggle for survival. But even today, in spite of the high

standard of living which has become general in the more fortunate West, the majority of people in

the world still spend nearly all their time and energy in a never-ending struggle with nature to secure

the food and shelter they need. Even in this elementary effort millions of human beings each year

die unnecessarily and wastefully from hunger, disease, or flood.

Yet,in the West, science and technology have made it possible for us to have a plentiful supply of

food, produced by only a fraction of the labour that was necessary even a few decades ago. In the

United States, for instance, one man on the land produces more than enough food to feed fifteen

men in the cities, and, in fact, there is a surplus of food grown even by this small proportion of the

American labour force. We have considerably extended our expectation of life. We have enriched

our lives by creating physical mobility through the motor-car, the jet aeroplane, and other means of

mechanical transport; and we have added to our intellectual mobility by the telephone, radio, and

television. Not content with these advances, we are now thrusting forward to the stars, and the

conquest o space no longer strikes us as Wellsian or Jules Vernian. And with the advent of the new

phase of technology we call automation, we have the promise both of greater leisure and of even

greater material and intellectual riches.

But this is not inevitable. It depends on automation being adequately exploited. We shall need to

apply our scientific and technological resources to literally every aspect of our society, to our

commerce, our industry, our Medicine, our agriculture, our transportation.

It is fascinating and encouraging to observe the development of this immense process, a process in

which man appears all the time to be engaged in the act of creating an extension of himself. In his

new technological successes this appears particularly true. He is extending his eyes with radar; his

tongue and his ear through telecommunication; his muscle and body structure through

mechanization. He extends his own energies by the generation and transmission of power and his

nervous system and his thinking and decision-making faculties through automation. If this

observation is accurate, as I believe it is, the implications are far-reaching. It might be reasonable to

conclude that the direction of modern science and technology is towards the creation of a series of

machine-systems based on man as a model.