Ove Arup's 1967 speech about progress, computers, and staying human in an age of automation

Skip to the text of the original speech here.

In 2018 I moved to Copenhagen for work. It was a period of my life where I was working very hard to build software to make people better at their jobs. Sometimes people were worried the software would lead to them losing their jobs. We would tell them that they had no need to be worried, the software would only replace the boring parts of their jobs, and free them up to do more of the interesting parts.

In the evenings I'd go home and read the Dialectic of The Enlightenment and One Dimensional Man. I was part of a book club which met weekly to talk about these books and the ways in which modern life was simultaneously bringing us apparent abundance and variety but also squeezing our identities into a single undifferentiated mould.

On weekends I'd go on walks around the city to clear my head. In the deep of winter it gets dark early, so in my memory there was a particular walk I took in the dead of night, however this can't have been true - because I also remember coming across a building that looks like this, and the building being open.

I wish I could find a better photo; one which captures the majesty of straight lines of glassy buildings greeting the tranquil waterfront, while still leaving space for the desire paths of a wandering pedestrian. At the time it gave me hope that you could you build a future that was both futuristic and bold, but also humane and friendly.

This particular building was the Danish Architecture Center. They were holding a retrospective on the life and work of Ove Arup. The subtitle of the exhibition was "On the Philosophy of Total Design". In that exhibition I heard a recording of snippets from a speech that would come to gently haunt me for the following seven years.

It featured words like these:

A glorious future
Awaits the computer,
But what about its poor master?
When even his tutors
Turn into computers
And progress is faster and faster,

and these:

The machine does no harm - as long as it is made to serve humanity and human values, as long as it does not change people in its own image, turning them into robots. Our new computer should enable us to do more with less drudgery, freeing us for better, more imaginative work. It will be a godsend to our clever engineers, who now really can let themselves go.

When I got home I spent many hours on google looking for a copy of the speech, but I could only find the text of another famous speech Arup gave. I had a few other clues to go on, but they were all kind of weird. The plaque in the museum said that Arup had given the speech during a "christening" ceremony for a computer named "Mumbo Jumbo". Online, I found a few references here and there to a "computer christening speech" but they were all from other people who'd been to exhibitions about Arup's work in London and in Copenhagen.

I contacted the organisers of the exhibition and they told me they did not keep a copy of the speech beyond the recorded snippets I'd heard. (As far as I understand the recording was also not an original of Arup's voice). I emailed the media enquiries address of the Arup Group - I assume they were too busy to get back to me, and I was too shy to follow up. Every now and then for the following few years I’d idly wonder about the speech and occasionally chase up a new lead.

I live in London now and still have dreams where I am walking through Copenhagen, however the Copenhagen which exists in my dreams has become increasingly detached from any real place on earth. Every building is open to the public. Monolithic entrances open out onto dark courtyards surrounding rectangular lakes which extend out onto sunny beaches.

One morning, I woke up with an urge to google "computer christening speech" again. A new result was now on the front page. It was an archive in Cambridge listing the speech in their collection. I wondered why "Churchill College, Cambridge" would have the speech, then I remembered reading that Arup had played various roles during World War 2, including designing bomb shelters and temporary ports.

I filled out the form to request a copy of the listing I'd found. A few days later I received an email with photos of a typewritten document. I finally had a full copy of Arup's original Computer Christening Speech.

It was even better than I imagined it would be. I emailed back to ask for permission to share it online as part of a blog post, and the archivists at the Churchill Archives found a contact at Arup who could approve this. With their permission I've uploaded the full text here.

What do you tell a team of engineers who are worried that their jobs are being replaced by computers?

Ove Arup's firm was among the first in the world to purchase and make productive use of digital computers. Prior to this the firm had also pioneered creative uses of reinforced concrete in order to build structures which would otherwise have been impossible to construct. In the limit, it turns out that doing this well ends up bottlenecked not just on materials science but on the sheer computational burden of solving structural engineering calculations. Arup employed thousands of people whose jobs involved solving pages and pages of calculus equations. Others were tasked with building physical models in order to safely construct the distinctive shapes of their various projects.

“Mumbo Jumbo” was not the first computer to be used at Arup - you can see in the first line of the speech that it is replacing a previous, older computer (presumably the Ferranti Pegasus bought about ten years prior used to design the Sydney opera house).

You don't need to read very deeply between the lines of the speech to see that Arup is reassuring his employees that the computer is no threat to them. Concern about the replacement of human cognitive labour with that of increasingly intelligent machines also isn't exactly an unprecedented worry. Samuel Butler spoke about this anxiety in 1863, Alan Turing, referencing Butler, speculates at the end of his 1951 speech that there will be great opposition to increasingly intelligent computers from "intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job". Incidentally, Turing was the author of the programming manual for an earlier Ferranti Computer - the Ferranti Mark 1. ¹

What makes Arup's speech notable to me is that this is an early recorded example of the leader of a corporation talking to real employees about the replacement of their cognitive labour by a digital computer.

Arup was an engineer, and CEO of the firm, and I have also seen him described as a philosopher and as an artist. However, unlike Turing or Butler's writings, Arup's speech is best understood as neither a work of philosophy nor as a work of literature. It is, above all, a work of leadership. It is also a lot of fun.

You can see this in several places throughout the speech. The vulnerability he shows by sharing his own doubts about the future of humanity in the face of increasing automation; the way he makes the computer seem less intimidating by picking an explicitly silly name for it; and his final emphasis that, above all, the arrival of a new computer will be a good thing for the company and that, therefore, this is a moment of celebration. It is also notable to me that Arup doesn't dismiss the concerns he names. His speech is one about making technological progress, but doing so with your eyes wide open to the approaching risks on the horizon.

We cannot go back to spinning wheels and candlesticks, the remedy for bad inhuman technology is better technology. The machine does no harm - as long as it is made to serve humanity and human values, as long as it does not change people in its own image, turning them into robots.

Closing thoughts

I tried a few times to summarise the speech myself, but it is short, incredibly rich, and no summary can do it justice. I highly recommend reading Arup in his own words.

I still remain curious about a few things:

• This wasn't the first computer Arup's firm bought. Did he give a speech for the first computer too? Do any records of earlier things Arup said about computers survive? How did his views on the role and use of computers evolve? There is a ten year gap between Arup's first computer and this speech, and anything similar Arup said or wrote when purchasing the first computer for his firm would likely be even more historically notable.
• The poem he reads is one that he says he wrote many years before. When did he write the poem? What prompted him to write it? Was he influenced directly by Turing's 1951 speech?
• How did it feel to be in the audience and hear this speech? How well received were the jokes?

I have also found this edition of an the Arup journal from 1968, which features several Arup employees talking about the use of computers at the firm.