PARTES O ESTRUCTURA Cuando hablamos de estructura

Invention

There are still a few odd items waiting to pop into existence that we can’t even imagine but which one day will seem as if they had always existed. Not many though. Human beings are good at inventing things but the more big breakthroughs that are made, the less there can be to come. There are only so many wheels and wheelbarrows to dream up. The rest is refinement and improvement.

In The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History

Since 1900 David Edgerton insists that nothing

significant has been invented in the last 20 years other, perhaps, than the GPS system. Interviewed on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he pointed out that he was sitting at a wooden studio desk, sitting on a chair, talking on the radio and that the newsreader had just mentioned the need to invest in railways and the threat posed by nuclear weapons – all examples of the continuing relevance of old technology.

In a list of the ten inventions which have had most impact on the last 1000 years of human history, published in 1999, the Economist, confirmed this verdict. The magazine accepted Francis Bacon’s three most important inventions

« Gunpower

« The magnetic compass « Printing

« Calculus

« The steam engine « Flight

« Photography « Electricity « Computer

« The oral contraceptive, the most recent big invention, which has been around since the 1960s. Edgerton does, however, concede that we can expect advances in nano technology and bio technology in the future.

Artificial intelligence is widely thought by scientists to offer another potentially creative area and when you buy a car in fifty years’ time you could well be served by a virtual sales assistant who doesn’t need to earn a commission.

Jobs

I’m convinced that – with a few exceptions – 75% to 95% of everything that happens in offices these days is inessential to the health of the business or to the smooth- running of public administration, and that the main function of work is more to keep our hands and minds busy and to give us somewhere to go each day. If you could only follow your boss around all day with a clipboard and a set of electrodes attached to his scalp, you would see for yourself how much of his day is spent not on sourcing raw materials and making sales but on defending his ego in the next board meeting and deciding where he will next go on holiday. It is the thought of being promoted to the same high-level preoccupations which keeps you churning out reports that no one reads and attending seminars intended to “build your core skills and make you a more effective team player”.

You may hate it all at times but you have an extraordinary choice nowadays of where and how you will get bored during daylight hours, which is the essence of having a job.

How things have changed. A couple of centuries ago no one had any choice at all. Your job was decided by your family’s fortunes and the pecking order. If your family was rich, your elder brother inherited half of Buckinghamshire (and later he’d get two or three parliamentary seats to play with) while you were glad to be given a small curacy in Wales; your younger brother meekly expected dad to buy him a commission

in the army even though he really wanted to be an actor and your youngest brother vanished from view, sent to plant wheat or harvest diamonds in South Africa. If you came from a middle class family you could choose from three tawdry professions, looked down upon by the upper classes: lawyer, doctor or teacher. Or you joined the family firm – even if you hated selling hosiery it gave you a job for life.

You counted yourself lucky that you were not part of the vast mass of people who had to do unspeakably laborious jobs for hardly any money in conditions of utmost grime, launching their offspring early into conditions of near slavery.

Then suddenly came the bizarre idea that you should do what you want and expect to get paid for it. For a time in the 1970s and 1980s, there was even a belief in Britain that you had the right to be unemployed and get paid for it.

Now there is a bewildering choice of careers available. What would someone in 1930s Britain have made of the choice between working in a call centre or joining the cabin crew of a low-cost airline?

Most of us expect to dictate our own careers. If we don’t like where we are or what we’re doing we happily switch employer or switch profession. We want to work short hours and enjoy long holidays and retire early with decent pensions. We want to work abroad, or from home. We want the world of work to adapt to us not the other way around. And no one questions any of this because we’re all doing it.

And it’s not long before we take the next logical step. Why work at all? Sell the house, move somewhere cheaper, give tarot readings for a living or make goat’s milk yoghurt or do whatever you enjoy. Give yourself the total lifestyle package. There’s only one drawback to doing exactly what you want for a living, as novelist Geoff Dyer puts it: “That’s the problem with having a lifetime off – you can never take a couple of days off.”

Sources

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson (2003) The Worst Jobs in History, by Tony Robinson (2004)