The Hum Before the Storm

In 1966, the year this book appeared, the ARPANET was still three years from its first node, the microprocessor was five years out, and the word "internet" meant nothing to anyone. John G. Burke assembled an anthology — and that's what this really is, a curated collection of voices rather than a single argument — aimed at a readership that could feel the ground shifting but hadn't yet learned the vocabulary for the earthquake. The New Technology and Human Values reads now less as prophecy and more as a seismograph: imprecise about the epicenter, but right about the magnitude. Burke understood that the central problem of the late twentieth century would not be whether technology advanced, but whether human institutions could metabolize the rate of change. That framing has not aged a day. What has aged is the faith, palpable on nearly every page, that the right committee of thoughtful men — and it was men — could steer the outcome. The book assumes a managerial class capable of wisdom, a public capable of patience, and a democratic process capable of incorporating technical knowledge. Three for three, that bet has not paid out.

Burke's prescience is structural rather than specific. He anticipated that automation would displace not just manual labor but entire categories of cognitive work, a concern that in 1966 sounded theoretical and in 2026 sounds like last Tuesday's layoff memo. The anthology's sections on science-and-society and policy-making foreshadow the entanglement of technical expertise with political authority that now defines everything from pandemic response to AI regulation. Where the book saw "emerging issues," we see permanent crises. But the specifics it could not imagine are telling. There is no anticipation of surveillance capitalism, no sense that the technologies in question might be designed not to serve human values but to extract and monetize them. The threat model throughout is displacement and alienation — the worker made redundant, the citizen made bewildered. The possibility that technology might actively manipulate desire, attention, and belief at industrial scale simply does not register. This is not a failure of imagination so much as a failure of cynicism. Burke and his contributors trusted that technology's owners would share their concern for human values. That trust now reads as the most dated thing in the book.

The blind spots are era-specific and therefore instructive. The conversation is overwhelmingly Western, white, male, and implicitly American. The "human" in "human values" is a particular human — college-educated, secular, anxious about leisure time rather than survival. The developing world appears, when it appears at all, as a recipient of technology rather than a participant in shaping it. Environmental consequences get glancing treatment at best; the idea that technology might render the planet itself hostile to human habitation was not yet a mainstream anxiety. And there is a confidence in the linear trajectory of progress — the assumption that scientific innovation moves in one direction and society must simply learn to keep up — that ignores the possibility of regression, fragmentation, or the deliberate weaponization of uncertainty. We have since learned that "the new technology" does not arrive as a single coherent force but as a thousand competing interests wearing the same lab coat.

Within the broader corpus of mid-century technology criticism, Burke's anthology occupies a transitional position. It draws on the tradition of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford — the sense that technique is not neutral — but packages that concern for a general audience rather than a philosophical one. It predates and in some ways sets the table for Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970), which would take the same anxieties and turn them into bestseller prose. What Burke gave his successors was the framework of the anthology itself: the idea that no single discipline owns the question of technology's meaning, that you need engineers and ethicists and economists in the same room. That interdisciplinary instinct is now so commonplace it feels obvious. In 1966 it was not. The book's lasting contribution is less any particular argument than the insistence that the argument must be had, and had broadly. It is a book that believes in the seminar. Whether the seminar ever convened with sufficient urgency is another matter.

Sixty years later, with algorithmic systems shaping elections, generative AI displacing creative professionals, and autonomous weapons operating beyond meaningful human oversight, Burke's anthology raises a question its contributors could not have formulated: what happens when the values embedded in the technology are not human values at all, but the optimization targets of systems that have no values — and the humans nominally in charge prefer it that way?