released the horse and projected it onto the plane of 
entertainment, so does automation with men. We are suddenly 
threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of 
self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This 
would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in 
society. It has the effect of making most people realize how 
much they had come to depend on the fragmentalized and 
repetitive routines of the mechanical era. Thousands of years 
ago man, the nomadic food-gatherer, had taken up positional, 
or relatively sedentary, tasks. He began to specialize. The 
development of writing and printing were major stages of that 
process. They were supremely specialist in separating the roles 
of knowledge from the roles of action, even though at times it 
could appear that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” But 
with electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented 
processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the