Abstract
Once upon a time, there may have been a fantasy of a leisure society, and a 15 h work week, but no longer. Perhaps the fantasy began to end when the first industrial robot was installed on an assembly line at a General Motors plant in New Jersey in 1961, and this love/hate fascination with automation and employment has been on our minds ever since; the largescale automation of labor has been around for over a century, even though some of us believe it’s just a recent phenomenon. It continues forward, as I will discuss in this chapter, and today, it has reached a tipping point when something needs to be done, given its impact on labor markets. A continuation of technological progress will be the easy part; the harder challenge will be the societal impact caused by a world without work.
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Buffington, J. (2016). The Future of Manufacturing: An End to Mass Production. In: Frictionless Markets. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19536-0_5
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