The other day I visited the plant of a firm that specializes in making direct mailings. The president of the company proudly showed me a computer and a printing unit producing individually typed letters at the rate of nearly four thousand an hour. The salutation of each letter was addressed to an individual, and throughout there were specialized bits of information that related only to the particular recipient. I asked the president how much labor it would take to make a similarly personalized mailing without a computer. He replied, "We used to do mailings like this, and it took the equivalent of fifty typists each working for ten hours to do what this computer does in a single hour, with only one man controlling it!"
While this is a dramatic illustration of the impact of automation on our society, it is but a single example of what is being repeated in business after business all over the world as the productivity of human beings continues to rise at an incredibly fast rate. This represents a meeting of the human need through the application of intelligence.
The most interesting aspect of this rise in productivity is the simultaneous decrease in the amount of physical effort required to produce the goods of this world. In fact, it is evident that in proportion as the physical effort has been replaced by mental forces, symbolized by the computer, the productivity of all of us has been tremendously increased. Today, in nearly every field of endeavor the yield of a single hour of work is growing by leaps and bounds, while at the same time the physical effort required is still declining.
