New Technologies and the Value of Work in America
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, has just published what promises to be an especially significant book worthy of wide attention - The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Reviews, not surprisingly, are good. What is most intriguing about this book, though, is its premise that in the rush to modernity modern man has lost and continues to lose significant aspects of civilization that have held communities together for millennia. In short, not everything "modern" is necessarily good and we should look carefully at what traditional societies around the world have to offer us today to help us resolve many of the perplexing social and societal problems that plague every so-called "advanced" or "modern" society. Related to this is a very sad, but challenging, article that appeared in today's Washington Post newspaper (see http://goo.gl/IEL3J ). As technology, particularly robotics a