In fact, we’ve been actively stopping it from allowing us to work less.
My father worked in IT for a public school system long before they started calling it “IT”. He’s the kind of guy who has a deck of punch cards on his desk to this day. He tells a story from the pre-internet days that their AS-400 computer had a modem and an ordinary POTS* line that was intended to let the system dial IBM with a status report. It could call tech support for itself. Most of the time, that modem sat unused, so he wrote a program that could use it to dial their bank and send payroll reports straight in instead of having to physically deliver them. Once the payroll clerks were done making their reports, they could just run another command and the AS-400 would do the thing.
Now you have to download the report to a Windows PC, go to a website with a browser, log into a website and manually upload them, so even though computers have gotten massively more powerful and massively more connected, the same process has gotten more manual.
Labor-saving technology can also let you work less.
We just don’t let it do that.
In fact, we’ve been actively stopping it from allowing us to work less.
My father worked in IT for a public school system long before they started calling it “IT”. He’s the kind of guy who has a deck of punch cards on his desk to this day. He tells a story from the pre-internet days that their AS-400 computer had a modem and an ordinary POTS* line that was intended to let the system dial IBM with a status report. It could call tech support for itself. Most of the time, that modem sat unused, so he wrote a program that could use it to dial their bank and send payroll reports straight in instead of having to physically deliver them. Once the payroll clerks were done making their reports, they could just run another command and the AS-400 would do the thing.
Now you have to download the report to a Windows PC, go to a website with a browser, log into a website and manually upload them, so even though computers have gotten massively more powerful and massively more connected, the same process has gotten more manual.
*Plain Old Telephone Service