Mechanocracy

Breuer, Miles J. . "Mechanocracy." Amazing April 1932. Collected The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories (Bison Frontiers of Imagination, University of Nebraska Press). Michael R. Page, editor. Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 2008.[1][2]

From Page's Introduction (p. xxvii): This story

[...] continues the dystopian themes from Paradise and Iron and "A Problem in Communication." Like Nat Schachner [...] Breuer presents a world in which the machine-systems have taken over, and humans have become more machine-like in their passive adherence to the dictates of the machine. The story recalls E. M. Foster's classic "The Machine Stops" (1909) and Fritz Lang's stunning film Metropolis (1927). We see the theme of an all-controlling machine intelligence used frequently in later science fiction, as in Poul Anderson's cold war parable, "Sam Hall," Thomas N. Scortia's fine novella "The Shores of Night," John Brunner's important novel The Shockwave Rider, and most famously in Harlan Ellison's "Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman." [...] Though somewhat more clumsy in execution than later stories on this theme, "Mechanocracy" remains of interest for its meditations on the problems of mechanization and totalitarianism in the context of the early 1930s and the rise of the totalitarian states in Europe [...].

RDE, Finishing, 29 June 2020