Check out this article for a good summary of all of the pressures on employment coming from technology and automation. I particularly appreciated Jon Evans' efforts here to connect the dots between the loss of employment with the first wave of efforts to deal with the problem: Basic Income or Negative Income Tax. Some writers have taken a dystopian view of this trend, others a utopian, but Evans suggests that the future has already happened. Only instead of happening in America and other developed countries, he suggests post-work societies exist in Brazil, Russia, and India. Also great is the list of links which is a veritable who's who on this topic. Enjoy!
Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
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