The Character and Circumstance of Canada's Industrialization

IN THE 1960S ROBOTICS appeared to hold such promise for industrialists that observers began predicting the complete replacement of blue-collar workers by a steel-collar labour force before trie end of the century. Yet the late 1980s find such predictions to have proven rather unrealistic for reasons quite unanticipated twenty years ago. Most surprising to industrialists, perhaps, has been the discovery that replacing humans by robots is often much easier in principle than in practice. After efforts failed to create effective machines for certain tasks, some robotics designers took to filming workers on the job in order to construct almost equallycompetent automatons. The unexpectedly slow growth of robotics attests to the basic contradiction between perceptions of mindless, routinized effort and the actual complexity of labour in industrial modes of production. The meaning of machines for labour has become a major focus of historical attention during the past decade, and the findings of recent studies speak to our understandings of both the past and the present Two fine examples of such research are the new books by Ian Radforth and Craig Heron. These are significant in that they reflect strengths of the research orientations of the 1970s and 1980s and also

Character (mathematics · Economics · Geometry · Industrialisation · Market economy · Canadian Identity and History · Mathematics · Research, Science, and Academia