Work, says a guru quoted in one of these books, is our "negotiation with death". That's putting it a bit strong, but work is clearly something that lots of people love to hate. Yet, in the rich world, work has changed dramatically in the past two or three decades, in ways that have got rid of some of its more disagreeable sides, and made what is left more interesting. The key changes have been the fading of routine manual work and the rise of jobs that make use of networked computers. Many of the more tedious jobs that most people did a century ago-factory work, farm labouring, mining-are almost gone. Robots, not human beings, now mainly man the production line, which symbolised the more oppressive aspects of the machine age.
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