Quote of the day by pioneer of cybernetics Norbert Wiener: 'The automated machine is the economic equivalent of slave labour' — foreshadowing the displacement of human labor in the years to come
These fears first sparked during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, but have continued in the years since. Most recently, the rise of generative AI has raised these fears once again. "Let us remember that the automatic machine... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.
- ▪These fears first sparked during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, but have continued in the years since.
- ▪Most recently, the rise of generative AI has raised these fears once again.
- ▪"Let us remember that the automatic machine... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.
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Record
| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-pioneer-of-cybernetics-norbert-wiener-the-automated-machine-is-the-economic-equivalent-of-slave-labour-foreshadowing-the-displacement-of-human-labor-in-the-years-to-come |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T22:00:42.719Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T22:00:42.719Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | c2GL5pe6Be9q · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Pro Quote of the day by pioneer of cybernetics Norbert Wiener: 'The automated machine is the economic equivalent of slave labour' — foreshadowing the displacement of human labor in the years to come Opinion By Keumars Afifi-Sabet Published 2 August 2026 Before the term AI was even coined, scientists were warning about the potential for intelligent machines to replace humans When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images/Bettmann/Contributor) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter For as long as humanity has envisioned a future co-existing with…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechRadar.
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