JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is the front and back cover of a little work directed at upper-aged kids in 1940 about how they might be employed and what life might be like in the future.  The Opportunity for Youth in Building the World of Tomorrow, published by General Motors in 1940, is a lot more sanguine and less interesting than its cover, sorry to say–but the cover is enough to reprint here, all on its own.  

There is one odd thing, one missed peep into the future, and it is made by a great figure in the history of 20th century science, Karl T. Compton, who at the time was president of MIT. He responded to a question about the impact of mechanization in a short section labeled “Man vs. Machine”. Dr. Compton got a lot right in his life and saw a lot of things that other people didn’t or couldn’t, but in 1940, he couldn’t see very far into the future of the machine.  Of course there’s a particular irony with this vision and what would happen with humans v. robots at GM.  So it goes.