Work is a worry, but most of us have to do it, and many of us have different attitudes towards it. Poet Philip Larkin, for example, spent 30 years as a successful librarian in Hull, but famously wrote a rebellious poem called 'Toads' in which he asks plaintively: 'Why should I let/the toad work/Squat on my life?'
He wants to use his wits to drive 'the brute' off, while in another line he refers to work as a 'sickening poison'.
Best-selling author Carlo Rovelli declares that in his radical youth the problem was how to avoid work. But unreconstructed Puritans feel compelled to work: they know that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as the lilies of the field, which neither toil nor spin, but this consideration is irrelevant to them, and such people are unhappy when idle. They can relax, but only up to a point, and only for a relatively short time, for they know they have to earn their place in the world.
Such people are now often regarded as strange specimens, and as anachronisms in that they subscribe to the quaint old belief that hard work will almost undoubtedly lead to all sorts of success.
Now such people, and they are not the only ones, are worried because work is becoming scarce, is perhaps on its way to becoming non-existent, for some estimates suggest that robots will have taken 800 million jobs by 2030.
Throughout March, the BBC gave much of its attention to this prospect in two series, entitled The Future of Work, and Reinventing the 9 to 5. In an advertisement for the former programme, a bemused man talks to an attractive female robot, who informs him that she has no job, but invests wisely, and is more intelligent than he is. She adds that 'where he is in five years' time' is largely up to him, an idea that many might consider inaccurate.
Automation and artificial intelligence are two looming fears at present. But we humans have always been worried about technology. My father tried to reassure me during the teenage years I spent in the shadow of The Bomb, when I passed sleepless nights fearing the world was about to end. 'People felt the same about the longbow and gunpowder,' he said, more than once.
"Decisions to automate are contingent on many factors that have little connection with technology, and the fact is that many jobs are