Lessons from The Brain Center at Whipple’s
Technology can be a barrier to ethics. We need leaders to consider the humanities just as deeply as the sciences as we develop new technology.

“I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.” — Dalai Lama
What is it about technology that makes us think we’re inoculated from the errors, pains, and foibles of what it means to be human?
I’m a big fan of the old Twilight Zone series, and I was recently watching it on Hulu. One of the episodes in the final season is called “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” and while it was made in the mid-1960s, it is remarkably timeless.
The episode opens with Mr. Whipple previewing a film with his Chief Engineer: an update that Whipple is making to the board of directors. He assesses the W.V. Whipple Manufacturing Corporation by the numbers: 283,000 personnel, 13 plants, and 34,827 people in one plant.
He says, “At Whipple’s, we only take forward steps,” and proceeds to introduce the X109B14 Automatic Assembly Machine, proudly announcing that it will replace 61,000 jobs, 73 machines, and save the company $4 million in employee insurance, welfare, hospitalization, and profit-sharing. And that the entire company would be automated within six months, running from a so-called “Brain Center” filled with similar machines.

He says all of this without emotion or regret, much to the chagrin of Hanley, the Chief Engineer, who does not approve of “a lot of men out of work.” He cautions Whipple about taking men’s livelihood and reason for being away from them, and about Whipple’s lack of goodwill and compassion through his “heartless manipulation of man and metals.”
Whipple’s response is one rooted in numbers: “I am here to provide efficiency. That is my only concern.” And in Whipple’s mind, efficiency only comes from machines.
And the ending was the classic Twilight Zone ironic twist.
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