Addendum

Well, what do you know? Two days after my post on the robots collecting the trash in my neighbourhood, the New York Times has a story about robotic arms moving stuff around Amazon (startling how"Amazon" no longer has, at first encounter, anything to do with the continent of South America: there was a story about lost tribes in the Amazon today, and it took me a few head-scratching seconds to realize that it wasn't that Amazon), and how this is just so much better for the warehouse workers, for example "Linda" who until recently was exhausting herself loading and carrying and stacking plastic bins filled with merchandise, and how she now spends her day outside a fenced cage in which robots do the same work, managing the robots--a job which, however, should also, no doubt soon, disappear. "Linda" says her new job is much more varied and intellectually stimulating. So you see, mechanization is not the end of work / workers after all.

I feel a lot better about the future of work.

Meanwhile the roof overhead is crawling with workers installing insulation on our 16-unit building, who every so often break into song, so I'm off to the gym and library until relative silence returns.