In 1978, Penthouse, a magazine that wanted to pee on you or someone, anyone, took a look at the automated future of our workforce in a good article, “Robot Lib,” by Bob Schneider. Quaint that the piece predicted Big Labor would delay factory automation by seventy years. An excerpt:

In fact several roboticists believe that the day when human blue collar workers are entirely replaced by solid-state slaves is not very far off. “With the spectrum of technology available now, it would be possible to eliminate most of the blue-collar jobs today performed by humans within the next twenty or thirty years,” [Joseph F.] Engelberger maintains. “But,” he adds, “because of the social, political, and economic factors involved, a more reasonable time is likely to be a hundred years.” These three factors can be reduced to two words: Big Labor. The unions know that robots will be replacing their people on the assembly lines as well as in the foundries–and they don’t like it. They’re already fighting a holding action: as of now a robot can only replace a worker who retires or dies.

Tom Binford believes that 30 percent of the human labor force could be replaced by intelligent sensitive automata within thirty years. And Robert Malone forecasts totally roboticized factories that will need practically no human supervision: fully autonomous robots will oversee production, and robot managers and foremen will direct blue-collar robots to best meet pre-programmed quotas. A single human could probably manage several factories at the same time.•