I have recently been browsing in Norbert Wiener's _Cybernetics_, which warped my mind when I was in highschool 55 years ago. It is a very uneven book, and I still find the mathematical parts largely incomprehensible. However, the first chapter, "Newtonian and Bergsonian Time", is a charming comparative history of philosophy & technology, and the last, "Information, Language, and Society", contains the following timely remark:

"There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market, the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and [will] redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory...."

His technological prognostications are sometimes quaint, but the following one in the introduction, on the likely consequences of what we now call automation, seems more sensible to me than it does to most people:

"...Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone's money to buy.

The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling...."