I am often asked to opine about whether automation will destroy all the jobs. Yes, we talk about tractors, which brought farm employment from something like 70 percent in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century to about 3 percent today. And about cars, which put the horse drivers out of business. And about trains, which put the canal boats out of business.
A more recent case has occurred to me, however. It’s the one represented by the photo at the top of this page. It may look unfamiliar to some today, but this is what offices looked like in the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, the photo shows a typing pool, and there used to be basketball-court-sized rooms that looked just like this, all over the place, staffed almost exclusively by women.
Then along came the copier—many of these women are copying documents by typing them over again with a few sheets of carbon paper—the fax machine, the word processor, the PC. And that’s just typing. Accounting involved similar ranks of women with adding machines. Women by the roomful used to operate telephone switchboards, now all automated.
This memory lives on in the architecture of universities. All the old buildings have empty hutches for secretaries.