Homer described the gates of Olympus opening by themselves, using the word that now names the factory's goal.
The Greek word automatos meant acting of itself, self-moving, or self-willed.1 Homer used it to describe the gates of Olympus opening on their own. The concept of things that move without human intervention is among the oldest in Western literature.
The English word automatic appeared by 1812. Automation, the noun describing the use of automatic equipment in production, entered common use around 1946.2
The term is often attributed to D.S. Harder, a Ford Motor Company executive who used it to describe the automatic handling of parts between production machines.3 The concept was not new, but the word gave it a label at the moment when postwar factories were replacing human tasks with mechanical systems at unprecedented scale.
Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) provided the theoretical framework, describing self-correcting feedback systems that could regulate machines without human supervision.4 By the 1960s, the word had migrated from factory floors to office work, describing any process in which machines performed tasks previously done by people.
John Maynard Keynes had anticipated the anxiety in 1930, coining the phrase technological unemployment to describe the condition of discovering the means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which new uses for labour can be found.5