David O. Woodbury, a science journalist highly regarded in business and technology circles, contended that the most inspiring promise of automation was not to increase leisure but to prolong the life of the Protestant work ethic. Woodbury rejoiced that technological progress would enable us to work even harder, not less. It would be better, he argued, if workers “did not attempt to work less, but to become more ambitious instead.” Rather than annul or mitigate the curse of incessant toil, automation would bestow an ecstatically promethean character to labor. Peering out to the horizon of
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