Hans Bayer’s journal article examines automation as a technical development whose consequences depend on economic organization, investment, and education. Moving from a survey of contemporary controversy through a conceptual definition to an assessment of development prospects, it distinguishes the continuity of technological invention from potentially revolutionary social effects. Its central question is not whether automation deserves enthusiasm or resistance, but how technical progress can serve collective welfare without intensifying concentration and alienation.
Bayer opens with three conflicting positions: automation is dismissed as an exaggerated name for incremental improvement, celebrated as the foundation of unprecedented prosperity, or feared as a source of unemployment and economic exclusion. Optimists envisage falling costs generating lower prices, increased demand, and renewed employment; critics point to drastic reductions in staffing and the vulnerability of smaller firms. Bayer treats neither prediction as adequately established. The controversy suffers from conceptual confusion and insufficient explanation. His international survey also makes automation relevant to Austria even where domestic adoption remains slow: foreign producers’ cheaper, better products and pressure to utilize installed capacity will intensify competition.
The conceptual section separates assembly-line organization, sometimes called “Detroitautomation,” from automation in the stricter sense. Bayer proceeds through open-loop and closed-loop control to feedback, using a cooking appliance to distinguish predetermined switching from a response to the actual condition of what is being cooked:
Es handelt sich also bei dem Feedback-Prinzip um Selbstkontrolle und Selbstkorrektur.
English translation: The feedback principle thus involves self-monitoring and self-correction.
Feedback provides the decisive conceptual step: machinery responds to external conditions according to an established program rather than merely executing a fixed sequence. Bayer nevertheless rejects the description of computers as thinking machines. He distinguishes conscious, purposive thought from automatic performance:
Auch bei der Automation denkt nur der Mensch. Der Mensch stellt das Programm und die Maschine führt es automatisch durch; insbesondere handelt es sich hierbei um Aufgaben, die von der formalen Logik abhängen, also Rechnen, Registrieren und Einteilen.
English translation: Even in automation, only the human being thinks. The human being establishes the program and the machine carries it out automatically; in particular, this involves tasks that depend on formal logic, namely calculating, recording, and classifying.
Examples from the Quelle mail-order business and the Bank of America show that this distinction does not diminish automation’s economic reach. Inventory control, order processing, and bookkeeping become central cases alongside factory production. Integration of these operations requires centralized organization, linking technical coordination to the concentration of enterprises.
Bayer therefore gives a qualified answer to the language of a “second industrial revolution.” Automation develops from existing streams of assembly-line organization and automatic control, but its effects can be revolutionary in scale and direction. Productivity gains extend especially to office work; displacement concerns routine clerical employees as well as manual workers. Large capital requirements, operational integration, and standardized production reinforce economic power. Automation also need not enrich the work remaining to employees. At Quelle, the ability to read five-digit numbers could suffice, while machinery and organizational requirements determined the workplace around them:
Es zeigt sich ganz allgemein, daß dann, wenn eine Arbeitszeitkürzung nicht mit der Automatisierung verbunden ist, der Mensch durch die Automation eine Einschränkung der Möglichkeiten erfährt, seine Persönlichkeit zu entfalten.
English translation: It becomes apparent quite generally that, when a reduction in working hours is not combined with automation, automation restricts the human being’s opportunities to develop their personality.
This conditional formulation locates a possible human benefit outside the automated task itself: increased productivity must also release time. Bayer further associates automation with atomic energy, proposing an accelerator effect through which the two technologies strengthen and hasten each other’s consequences.
The final section examines two limits to expansion: capital costs and specifically trained personnel. Expensive installations favor large enterprises and increase dependence on bank credit, strengthening finance capital. Following Schumpeter, Bayer recognizes that newly created purchasing power can enable economic development, but warns of inflationary tendencies without investment guidance. Personnel scarcity, meanwhile, concerns engineers and technicians rather than an insufficient aggregate labor supply. Drawing on discussions of population growth and resource extraction, he describes a qualified reversal of Malthus: sustaining a growing population depends on cultivating the abilities that make new resources usable. His practical Austrian conclusion is educational—scholarships and other support should prevent financial barriers from wasting talent.
Bayer then distinguishes inventive creativity, with its autonomous momentum and contingent discoveries, from the subsequent adaptation of inventions to production and markets. Welfare depends on connecting these processes to economic organization:
Für die Auswirkung des technischen Fortschrittes auf den Gesamtwohlstand ist entscheidend, ob es gelingt, die Technik organisch in die Wirtschaftsentwicklung einzubauen oder, anders ausgedrückt, die gegenseitige Ergänzung von Technik und Wirtschaftsgestaltung, den technischen und wirtschaftlichen Komplementaritätseffekt zu erreichen.
English translation: For the effect of technical progress on overall prosperity, what is decisive is whether technology can be organically incorporated into economic development or, in other words, whether the mutual complementarity of technology and the shaping of the economy—the technical and economic complementarity effect—can be achieved.
The closing critique of Rüstow and Röpke clarifies this demand without supplying a comprehensive program. Bayer fears that vague public criteria for directing research could produce administrative arbitrariness, while calls for a decentralizing “social technology” leave its technical realization unexplained. Neither can simply halt technological momentum. The article’s enduring contribution is its refusal to equate technical capacity with social progress: automation’s promise requires economic and social arrangements capable of converting productivity into general welfare, a task its conclusion deliberately leaves open.
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