We are in a tough transition in which there was plenty of need for basic manufactured goods to one in which the need for such things is sated. That implies a tough transition for the proletariat who could fare well when such things as televisions and microwave ovens were scarce and costly. It is telling that Goodwill no longer accepts old TV sets as donations. What was once precious is now ordinary and banal.
The forty-hour workweek may have to go. Computers and software may greatly reduce the need for office jobs. People could dictate their words into writing, as writing has been synthesized into speech for about thirty years. We will need to better figure how to use leisure time. On the other hand, think of how much more attention and indulgence children can get in an age of shorter hours of work. (We will also have to improve patterns of child-raising, which implies that a thoroughly-awful method, the authoritarian brutality in which bossy parents end up with children who must rebel just to keep some individuality, must largely vanish).
The better world will be more educated and more efficient. It might put less emphasis on status symbols and more on experiences.
The forty-hour workweek may have to go. Computers and software may greatly reduce the need for office jobs. People could dictate their words into writing, as writing has been synthesized into speech for about thirty years. We will need to better figure how to use leisure time. On the other hand, think of how much more attention and indulgence children can get in an age of shorter hours of work. (We will also have to improve patterns of child-raising, which implies that a thoroughly-awful method, the authoritarian brutality in which bossy parents end up with children who must rebel just to keep some individuality, must largely vanish).
The better world will be more educated and more efficient. It might put less emphasis on status symbols and more on experiences.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.