Ray Ray’s Reviews > Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us > Status Update

Economists scratched their heads wondering how we in the 21st century would fill all our spare time once much of our work had been offloaded to robots. (At least half of that notion is still true, though now we are substantially less optimistic ... The 20th century forgot to ask an important question: who will own the robots?). Our material environment shapes us, but it will not save us.

plants Snake plant (sansevieria), Peace lillies, howea forsteriana, fiddle leaf figs, ficus

"ensuring 'your child regularly spends time playing outside may help to reduce the risk of becoming short-sighted.'...because it is now believed that it is not books, screens or phones that are the most influential causes of myopia but that it is a byproduct of the fact that these things tend to be done indoors./Babies are all born long-sighted. As we grow, the eyeball changes shape like an auto focus on a camera..."

"The Victorian work ethic we have all inherited has a lot to answer for."

"The catastrophic realization that one's life has been wasted in useless toil for someone who has exploited you, destroyed your body, taken their profit and left you to starve is the single most dramatic moment of a working life."

"It also contains those two necessaries for any health book- advice that puts the onus for pathology on the individual, and a machine to help cure it."

William Morris...characterized the new class system as, "a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work which produces nothing, and the class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work which is often unproductive."

"You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them." - John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1853)