MAIN IDEA:

This book reviews various types and nature of work, from hunter-gatherers to agricultural labor to work in the contemporary economy, whether as salaried people or self-controlled high-tech workers. The book is based not only on theoretical knowledge but also on detailed anthropological observations of hunter-gatherers and the destruction of their world after an encounter with more powerful societies. The book also looks at functional developments of the work process in energy, production, and use of tools. It also analyses the development of various forms of interaction with the environment, whether concerning types of living: cities vs. villages vs. nomads or division and organization of labor and trade. Finally, the book discusses our automated future, which inevitably includes the creative destruction of the currently existing form of society. It is unclear how it will look, but it has to be sustainable or else…

MY TAKE ON IT:

It is an excellent description of the historical development of human interaction with the environment in the process of resource acquisition from the earlier stages typical to the most animals to uniquely human and very complex contemporary world. This description is nearly utterly consistent with my understanding of these processes, so there is little to add. However, I would like to expand something that the book only hints at: “Other interesting approaches propose extending the fundamental rights we give to people and companies to ecosystems, rivers, and crucial habitats.”. I believe it will be a crucial change in the organization of society if all people get equal and unalienable property rights on all forms of shared and undividable resources. If implemented, such an organization would provide necessary resource flow to everybody without the need for work as the long automated process could generate such resource flow. However the idea of giving rights to non-humans such as “environmental systems” means just giving power to some people to control activities of others under pretense of defending these “rights”. This approach would lead to no good because it would mean fighting between humans for representing rights of these “environmental systems”, which would be no different than traditional fight for resources.