What happens when the founder of cybernetics realizes his own invention could gut the labor movement? Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, describes how Norbert Wiener reached out to Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers to warn that automation was coming for factory jobs — an overture that stalled amid Wiener's declining health. Mueller traces how the warning rippled into a wider debate, with civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X weighing what mass automation, or "cybernation" as it was then called, would mean for a movement dependent on industrial jobs.
FULL EPISODE URL — https://youtu.be/wPReUybxLMM
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