When the World’s Fair came to Queens, New York, in 1964, robots were shown taking over housework, coming soon to a home near you. When the Fair closed, the exhibits moved to Disney World and made the same claim for the next 30 years: the robots are coming, just around the corner. Except they didn’t.
In the 1990s, the expansion of distributed computer power and the vast purchases of it led to new claims about massive increases in productivity that would soon be released. Except it didn’t. It took a long time and associated changes in how work was organized to drive productivity improvements.
