"The Triple Revolution" was an open memorandum sent to

U.S. President The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States ...

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...

and other government figures on March 22, 1964. Drafted under the auspices of the

Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California was an influential think tank from 1959 to 1977. Its influence waned thereafter and it closed in 1987. It held discussions on subjects it hoped would influence publ ...

, it was signed by an array of noted

social activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in Social change, social, Political campaign, political, economic or Natural environment, environmental reform with the desire to make Social change, changes i ...

s, professors, and technologists who identified themselves as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The chief initiator of the proposal was W. H. "Ping" Ferry, at that time a vice-president of CSDI, basing it in large part on the ideas of the futurist Robert Theobald.Bell, Daniel. ''The Coming of Post-Industrial Society'' (Basic Books, 2008), p.462n.

Overview

The statement identified three

revolution In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due ...

s underway in the world: the ''cybernation revolution'' of increasing

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

; the ''weaponry revolution'' of

mutually assured destruction Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would cause the ...

; and the ''

human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

revolution''. It discussed primarily the cybernation revolution. The committee claimed that machines would usher in "a system of almost unlimited productive capacity" while continually reducing the number of

manual labor Manual labour (in Commonwealth English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. It is most literally work done with the hands (the word ''manual ...

ers needed, and increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing increasing levels of

unemployment Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refere ...

. It proposed that the government should ease this transformation through large-scale

public works Public works are a broad category of infrastructure projects, financed and constructed by the government, for recreational, employment, and health and safety uses in the greater community. They include public buildings ( municipal buildings, sc ...

, low-cost housing,

public transit Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) is a system of transport for passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public unlike private transport, typic ...

electrical power Electric power is the rate at which electrical energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second. Standard prefixes apply to watts as with other SI units: thousands, millions and billions o ...

development,

income redistribution Redistribution of income and wealth is the transfer of income and wealth (including physical property) from some individuals to others through a social mechanism such as taxation, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confis ...

, union representation for the unemployed, and government restraint on technology deployment.

Legacy

Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...

's final Sunday sermon, delivered six days before his April 1968 assassination, explicitly references the thesis of "The Triple Revolution": In Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology '' Dangerous Visions'',

Philip José Farmer Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Obituary. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the ''World of Tiers ...

's story "

Riders of the Purple Wage ''Riders of the Purple Wage'' (1967) is a science fiction novella by American writer Philip José Farmer (1918-2009). It appeared in ''Dangerous Visions'', the New Wave science fiction anthology compiled by Harlan Ellison and won the Hugo Award ...

" uses the Triple Revolution document as the premise of a future society, in which the "purple wage" of the title is a guaranteed income dole on which most of the population lives. At the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, Farmer delivered a lengthy Guest of Honor speech in which he called for the founding of a grassroots activist organization called REAP which would work for implementation of the Ad Hoc Committee's recommendations. Looking back on the proposal in his 2008 book,

Daniel Bell Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919 – January 25, 2011) was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading A ...

wrote: In his 2015 book ''Rise of the Robots'', Martin Ford claims The Triple Revolution's predictions of steady decline in future employment were not wrong, but rather premature. He cites "Seven Deadly Trends" that began in the 1970s-1980s and by the mid 2010s appeared set to continue: # Stagnation in real wages US productivity and earnings

# Decline in labor's share of national income in many countries (breakdown of

Bowley's law Bowley's law, also known as the law of the constant wage share, is a stylized fact of economics which states that the wage share of a country, i.e., the share of a country's economic output that is given to employees as compensation for their work ...

), while corporate profits increased # Declining

labor force participation Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refere ...

# Diminishing job creation, lengthening jobless recoveries, and soaring long-term unemployment # Rising inequality # Declining incomes, and

underemployment Underemployment is the underuse of a worker because a job does not use the worker's skills, is part-time, or leaves the worker idle. Examples include holding a part-time job despite desiring full-time work, and overqualification, in which the ...

for recent college graduates # Polarization and part-time jobs (middle-class jobs are disappearing, to be replaced by a small number of high-paying jobs and large number of low-paying jobs) According to Ford, the 1960s were part of what in retrospect seems like a golden age for labor in the United States, when productivity and wages rose together in near lockstep, and unemployment was low. But after about 1980, wages began stagnating while productivity continued to rise. Labor's share of the economic output began to decline. Ford describes the role that automation and information technology play in these trends, and how new technologies including narrow AI threaten to destroy jobs faster than displaced workers can be retrained for new jobs, before automation takes the new jobs as well. This includes many job categories, such as in

transportation Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, ...

, that were never threatened by automation before. According to a 2013 study, about 47% of US jobs are susceptible to automation.

Signatories

Bibliography

*Perrucci, Robert, and Pilisuk, Marc ditors "The Triple Revolution: social problems in depth", Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1968.

References

External links