Workin' at it

Labor Day. It evokes the whole of the tumultuous Twentieth Century. From Pope Leo the XIII's pronouncement of the morality of the struggle for reform of labor conditions in 1894 to the rise of the trade professional in an entrepreneurial context in the 1980's and 1990's, it assumes symbolic importance in the life of industrial nations. It is the bookmark of the grand narrative of the relation of man to machine and as technology raises the bar to dizzying heights in the last act of that grand narrative, we are left to wonder at what we have done.
Pause and reflect this Labor Day on who ran the show in the Twentieth Century and wonder about how much of the struggle for worker's rights and living wages was simply a desperate reaction to the tail wagging the dog, to the machine structuring human society.
Today we stand eyeball to eyeball with technology. The list of tasks that machines do better than humans is grown long and worrisome. Whose world is it anyway and what good is a machine in the quest for meaning that is human existence if it drives the process.
What does meaning mean to a robot?
The die is pretty much cast in terms of technological context. The bar is pretty much raised. What we are left to ponder is our treatment of the dispossessed and our individual, empowered, visions of the future.
What kind of lives will we make in this world we have made?
What better day than Labor Day is there for we dogs in the technological car to worry that bone?
Do well and be well.
'Chances', available on Amazon.