Automation

Every serious conversation about automation arrives at the same reassurance. People, we are told, will finally be freed from work. For anyone whose work is dangerous or crushing, the promise is real mercy, and nothing below argues otherwise. Still, a question hides beneath the reassurance, and the debate almost never touches it. If work were nothing but a burden, why did the traditions that thought hardest about the soul keep treating it as a practice? Before the machines take the tasks, it is worth asking what the tasks were doing for us. ...