Are Human Beings Necessary? [1951]

This paper is not so much a review of The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) as a breezy commentary on the automated society foretold by American mathematician Norbert Wiener. Russell’s thoughts were first published in the popular British magazine Everybody’s Weekly, London, 15 Sept. 1951, p. 13, and then reprinted in the United States, with omissions, as “What Will People Do When Machines Take Over All Our Work?”, The Minneapolis Star, 12 Oct. 1951, p. 18. Several months previously, John Hone asked Russell to carry on a discussion in Everybody’s of “the probable effect of Mechanisation, and in particular the invention of the Mechanical Brain, on the future of Mankind”. The British magazine’s “literary advisor” quoted from the conclusion to a recent (unidentified) article on the subject by Leonard Rule, which urged philosophers to “come in to reason out the human problems of the revolution which is waiting for us, whether we want it or not”.