In the 1950s, automation promised to liberate humans from "drudgery" and reorient us on the "human use of human beings", in the words of computer scientist Norbert Wiener. On the 1956 campaign trail, incumbent Republican Vice President Richard Nixon predicted that Americans could look ahead to a four-day work week in the "not-too-distant future", thanks to automation. Less work meant more play.
In California, an independent animation studio opened up a plucky little amusement park in 1955 to capitalise on all this newfound leisure time: Disneyland.
While the general optimism around what automation could offer humanity has faded, Disneyland remains closely linked to the story of this technology. The amusement park was inspired by the wondrous machines and systems that Walt Disney saw during a fortuitous trip to Ford's River Rouge plant in 1948. Since then, Disneyland has systematically turned new forms of automation into unique experiences that shatter the normal bounds of conventional entertainment. Under the guise of leisure, Disneyland continues to create spaces for the public to familiarise themselves with the technology and gadgets that run their lives.
From the start, the amusement park put a friendlier face on automation by Disney-ifying the workings of factory systems.
This was true of two of the park's opening attractions. A Cleveland Tramrail overhead monorail, a conveyor system used to move materials across the factory floor, allowed visitors to take a fanciful trip over Neverland on Peter Pan's Flight. And on Mr Toad's Wild Ride, a control system monitored visitors' movements, making sure their one-seat roadsters didn't take any unexpected turns. These mechanised rides were powered by the same stacks of relay racks that ran manufacturing operations, referred to in the 1950s as "electronic brains" -- the precursors to modern computer controls. Every Disneyland ride can be thought of as a kind of assembly line in this way: where the person is the product, moving along the conveyor belt as machines entertain with gags and thrills, teaching you to view automation as a source of fun, not anxiety.
Walt Disney had a lifelong dream of "animating the inanimate", from the cartoon characters of his movies to the mechanical animatronics of his theme park. Throughout his life, he pushed the boundaries between human performance and technological innovation. He shared in the larger early 20th-century fascination with the ability of the machine to do the labour of the human -- despite whatever concerns it might also stir in workers. Disney was an avid reader of scientific literature in popular magazines, like Scientific American and Popular Mechanics, and loved to promote his attractions as affiliated with the cutting-edge technologies of the time, from the Polaris missile to nuclear submarines.
Disney provided a weekly inside look at the making of his films and the building of his new theme park on his Disneyland TV show, which cultivated audiences' enchantment by technology. As the narrator commented on one 1955 episode, Peter Pan's Flight was "powered not by pixie dust, but by a sturdy monorail".
In the early 1960s, Disney introduced audio-animatronics -- moving and talking robots made famous by the Enchanted Tiki Room and Great Moments with Mr Lincoln. According to one animatronics engineer, Jack Gladish, Disney declared, "I'm tired of finicky actors. I want to develop a fully animated, articulated human being to use in place of motion picture actors and actresses."
The artist and Disney Imagineer Herb Ryman, who drew the early illustration of Disneyland, offered this explanation for the development of animatronics, recounting that Walt Disney told him: "You can't have human beings working three or four shifts; we can't afford to pay 'em, or they'll make mistakes, or somebody won't show up … We've got to figure out a way to have automated shows."
Disney staff began to worry about the implications of increasing automation. But for the most part, the theme park offered Disney a space for experimentation that was largely insulated from the period's panic about automation's impact on labor. In 1967, a LIFE magazine story covering the opening of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride treated it as a joke rather than a critique. "Disneyland's amazing robots must have posed quite a problem for Actors' Equity: they can do practically anything human actors can except receive fringe benefits and draw overtime," began the article.
Disney theme parks still serve this purpose for the company. While today's AI wars rage in Hollywood, the unveiling of an Olaf "robotic character", powered by AI, received little criticism for replacing a costumed actor. After all, no human could ever embody the adorable Olaf as accurately as a petite, free-roaming robot.
It's no coincidence that the AI revolution is filled with sweet names like Claude, Nano Banana, Alexa, and Siri. Tech companies are trying to make their robots seem cute to lessen the shock of the new, taking a page right out the Disney playbook.
Advertisements for our robot replacements prominently feature them solving problems that will improve our quality of life, from offering relationship advice to dinner recommendations. Video and image-generating AI promise that we'll step into our own fantasies at the touch of a button. Ultimately, AI's main selling point is that whatever work we do have, it can help us do with less effort and less thinking.
Disneyland and AI both put us at ease with automation. By making technology less intimidating, accessible, and associated with leisure, companies seduce us into loving the technology replacing us. Zócalo Public Square
Roland Betancourt is the author of 'Disneyland and the Rise of Automation', a three-decade history of the theme park and its technologies. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.
