Is There Something Structural About the Modern Age?

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There's aninteresting book about this axebii called andrew vil called the fisherd work place. He explores why this happened, historically a so really in the middle part of the twentieth century there was a trend towards very large corporate organizations. And instead you find is that companies are focusing on what they view as their corp competency,. They're out sourcing a lot of the other forms of work and to part time contractors or other companies that specialize in, say, the provision of accounting services or security staff and so on. But workers tend to get the worst deal in t thisarrange yet. The advances in surveillance technology have enabled can have greater consistency and enforcement of corporate standards.

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working pretty hard. But maybe that’s about to change. Futurists like John Danaher believe that society is finally on the brink of making a transition to a world in which work would be optional, rather than mandatory — and he thinks that’s a very good thing. It will take some adjusting, personally as well as economically, but he envisions a future in which human creativity and artistic impulse can flourish in a world free of the demands of working for a living. We talk about what that would entail, whether it’s realistic, and what comes next.

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John Danaher received an LLM degree from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. from University College, Cork. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research is situated at the overlap of legal studies and philosophy, and frequently involves questions of technology, automation, and the future. He is the coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, and author of the recent book Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work. He writes frequently for publications such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Irish Times, and is the host of his own podcast, Philosophical Disquisitions.