Age of the Search Engine

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century has passed since I first wrote this history of work. Our children have been reared in the new age of the Internet, an age of instant communications and democratized knowledge, but also an age of extremes where grinding poverty at one polar end of society contrasts with fabulous wealth at the other. It is a world where governments persist with economic solutions to recession and unemployment that may have worked in the twentieth century but which are ill-suited to the growing challenges of environmental degradation in the shadow of climate change.

The Earth is nobler than the world we have put upon it.

(J.B. Priestley, 1894–1984)