Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION I didn’t think that he’d do that to me, but I wasn’t taking any chances, so I tried to think of something really clever to say. ““By cybernetics ?” “Of course. How else can we relieve the world of the crushing labour problem? While we depend on men and the muscles of men to build our economy we will always have strife and misunder- standing. In effect, we are no better than the old Greeks or Romans with their slave culture. We don’t own slaves now, but we still confine the working classes by economic chains. Cybernetics willchange all that.” I looked over my shoulder, glad to see that we were alone. Personally, I didn’t mind what Slats said, but others, Clarkson in particu- lar, would have considered it his duty to report the profes- sor for “‘foreign sympathies.” That bit about the “working classes” had put more than one man on the bread line. 104 I tried to get him off the subject. “Do you think that you will ever be able to replace the working man, Prof?” ““We could do it tomorrow,” he snapped. “We already know enough about cyber- netics to replace half the labour in the world with electronic devices. Take you, for example.’ He pointed a finger at me as though it were a gun. ““What are you? Basic- ally, I mean? A machine, that’s what? A well-designed and efficient machine. You rake out furnaces, sweep floors, clean up when necessary, act . as a general help and do a dozen and one different jobs during the course of the day.” Again the finger stabbed at me. “But there isn’t anything you do, in a manual way that is, that a machine couldn’t do better. The only thing you can do which a machine can’t is to think, to reason, to extra- polate. That is the only thing which divides Man from Machine. I...” | Qa comiclbooks.corn