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To: Billthedrill

38 posted on 11/26/2002 6:50:14 PM PST by Momaw Nadon
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To: Momaw Nadon
Yeah, baby! It's hell, I'm tellin' ya, hell...

I think, to be halfway serious for a moment, that what will change is the nature of what we think of as "work," just as it has already changed. The percentage of a hunter-gatherer's day spent acquiring food was huge. The percentage of the average American salaried worker's day spent in the same pursuit is minimal by comparison. The bulk of his efforts these days go toward (1) shelter, ever fancier and more luxurious, and (2) the big one - amusement. Entertainment. It is no accident that athletes and actors are paid what they are paid, it's what the market will bear because the market is there. Good grief, people will work days on end to purchase boxes that put little lights on a phosphor or LED screen to simulate what people used to have to do to stay alive.

But I don't see most of us, the better part anyway, turning inward like that. The people who earn more money than they or their descendants can ever spend, continue to work, all of them. (Their descendants do not. Bummer for them.) We have a lot of work ahead of us as a species, and a very large universe to try to explore. And even those of us who stay kept, will be doing just what our own predecessors needed to do to survive, for fun.

So technology won't really do a lot for us except to change the nature of our work. Well, the orgasmatronic nuclear-powered penile implant, maybe, but that's it!

76 posted on 11/26/2002 7:21:28 PM PST by Billthedrill
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