Robots have been about to take all the jobs for more than 200 years -- Timeline

In it, the king of automation made some optimistic predictions about machines creating more jobs than they take away--in retrospect, very prescient. In 1940, the President of MIT, Karl Compton and President Franklin D. Roosevelt clashed over the question. As chronicled by the Times, the president of MIT didn't see a problem whereas the nation's president did. The same year a US senator suggested a tax on machines to offset the unemployment they may cause. "Who will have the last laugh in the gadget age -- man or machine?," asked Pulitzer Prize-winning AP writer Hal Boyle in 1949.