ABSTRACT
Production control is used here in the broad sense of ownership and management of a society's production facilities, rather than in its narrower meaning of local production supervision. Thus far, discussion has been limited to describing the effects of man-machine interaction within the work environment. But the changes occurring at this level will communicate themselves upward, and outward, so that the broader aspects of the growing technology — its modes of production control, media of exchange, systems of distribution, etc. — will come increasingly under the dominance of the production system. The succession is one in which new mechanical configurations will increasingly replace traditional social controls. The broad framework within which production mechanization is occurring is social. Our present modes of ownership and labor usage are social hold-overs from a pre-industrial, feudal period, which will be either amalgamated into mechanical extensions of our production activity or, if not amenable to mechanization, will be rejected from the system altogether. The criterion for the survival of these factors will be their compatibility with a growing mechanization, and those not tractable to this process will be forced into discard, not by bloody revolution but by the system, itself, in its natural course of growth.
