BACK in the mists of time, circa the early '60s, high school students had to undergo what would now be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment, and any teacher now attempting it would be consigned to the ducking stool and unfriended.
Yes, in English classes we actually had to write things called essays.
Not SAs, as in Self-Assessments, in which students and teachers spend vast tranches of valuable class time determining what style of learning best enhances the student's ability to randomly tick multiple-choice answers.
But essays, as in using actual words sufficiently coherently to express viewpoints via a written language comprehensible to at least one other person.
A favourite topic of these pedagogically extravagant essay things was something along the lines of: "Given how automation is soon going to be doing everything for us, how are we to fill in the vast amounts of leisure time about to inundate us all?"
Teacher would dutifully chalk the topic up on the blackboard in all seriousness as this issue was regarded as a bona fide imminent dilemma (a clue as to how long ago all this occurred is that teachers still used actual chalk. One dapper master, though, was reluctant to contaminate his impeccable three-piece suits with pollutant chalk dust -- his blackboard eraser was a cloth dampened in a specially supplied bowl of water. But I digress).
Oh, would that it all have turned out so. How innocent -- and laughable -- were the times. The implicit scenario underpinning the proposition was that in a few years everyone would be leading a Jetsons-type existence, with robots catering to all manufacturing and industrial needs, and households positively humming with automated appliances anticipating every move.
Hand picked: Robots are increasingly performing some tasks, but not mandarin picking.
True, all of 50 years later -- at a bit of a stretch -- things could be said to have panned out that way for a certain 0.001 per cent of the population so inclined to surround themselves with such knick-knackery.
But as we know, it only takes one decimal point to be awry on the digital controller, or a toothpick trying to go up the vacuum cleaner hose sideways, for the best-intentioned systems to crash and haemorrhage.
Still, we seem to enjoy the fantasy, and the world is again abuzz with similar prophecies attendant to yet another version of Brave New World AI -- new generation Artificial Intelligence.
As we speak, no doubt pedagogues are constructing multiple-choice questions for students on the topic of how to cope with the approaching tsunami of leisure time.
Granted, robotics has replaced many a mind-numbingly repetitive manual job -- they're even milking cows, although the expense involved requires jamming another couple of hundred cows on to the farm to cover bank repayments. For those with a spare king's ransom, some fancy new robotic kiwifruit picker is even set to hit the market.
But the over-arching reality is that we still rely on countless low to medium-skill jobs to be performed manually. We even import about 40,000 workers from abroad simply to harvest crops, despite the fact that we've well in excess of 100,000 unemployed ourselves. And given the highly tenuous official definition of "employed", the true figure is probably more like 200,000. Incredible.
As in the past, the nature of many jobs will markedly change. You don't see many blacksmiths, cobblers or toll operators any more.
But, despite the electronic revolution supposedly putting paid to most paper work, paper mountains are bigger than ever, paper-shufflers still abound, and someone still needs to change the light bulbs.
So don't expect squadrons of liberating robots to come galloping over the horizon any time soon.
And it's just as well -- depressingly, we can't cope with the disengaged legions we already have. Disengagement that's hothousing the loss of life skills, self-confidence, and social empathy in turn driving our real growth industries -- the raft of bottom-of-the-cliff agencies forlornly trying to cope with the end-product dysfunctionally disengaged.
