Numerical Control
Numerical control is a system for automating machine tools by replacing the skilled machinist's hands with coded instructions written by engineers in a separate programming department. Developed at MIT's Servomechanisms Laboratory between 1949 and 1952 under Air Force funding, it became the dominant form of industrial automation in the second half of the twentieth century. Noble's archival research demonstrated that its selection was driven not by technical superiority but by its capacity to transfer productive knowledge from skilled workers to management — establishing it as the canonical case study for arguments that technological trajectories reflect institutional interests rather than autonomous engineering logic.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The technical architecture separated conception from execution along lines Frederick Taylor had proposed four decades earlier. A programmer in the engineering department read the drawing, wrote a sequence of commands specifying tool paths and feed rates, and punched the commands onto tape. The tape fed into the machine, which executed the instructions without the machinist's intervention. The machinist was reduced to setup