> And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother - wanted to work.
In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where nobody worked. The strategic goal, never yet realised although AI might finally manage it, is to push people out of the workforce rather than in to it. Signing your daughter up to be a wage slave may be an improvement on the 1950s it isn't really the sort of thing that makes a good long term goal.
Working is so much more than being a “wage slave”.
Women had to work anyway, except that it was isolated, lonely and without respect. Try to spend your (entire) existence cooking, cleaning and looking after kids while having a good set of brains. It will destroy your soul.
Being an educated “wage slave” is a massive improvement. Work in any way shape or form cannot be avoided. Not because it is physically necessary, but because of who and what we are.
The actual problem is not "destroys your soul", but rather the fact that women working for home have no financial autonomy; they depended on their husband entirely. Divorce was worse than losing your job.
"Nobody works" is a bit naive, indeed. "Nobody has to work, but can if they want" is a bit more realistic, but I believe a not-so-bad possible future is "nobody has to work, but you have to compete with others to get the job you want". Capitalism and workers would have to stop being 19th century husband and wife, though.
This could be helped by the challenge ahead of us: managing the stabilization of world population count. We've been talking about the necessity to do that for years, just like climate change - and just like climate change it will eventually happen, inducing slow changes in our societies.
World population is rising, but most prosperous countries have falling birth rates and are either shrinking, or barely kept from shrinking by immigration.
This is a problem. It means many more people are born into poverty and a life where they will barely scrape by, whilst the people with any kind of access to effective production get fewer, and spend more time taking care of dependents than on improving the lives of others.
We don't just need to drop birth rates in poor countries (by reducing child mortality, and increasing prosperity). We also need to increase birth rates in the prosperous countries.
>In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where nobody worked.
pretty much all Sci-Fi of that time imagined a future with jobs, perhaps that was because the center of power had shifted to the U.S, perhaps it was just because they did not imagine Utopias or Dystopias that much, but rather just worlds with some additional technical advancements and generally 1 big problem/opportunity brought on by the advancement.
The earlier writers were more apt to imagine Utopias.
> perhaps that was because the center of power had shifted to the U.S
How does that follow? For as long as we can remember or we have written records for, we've had jobs. So it's natural to assume that a million years in the future, if we still inhabit roughly similar form as we do now, we'd have something resembling jobs (for a multitude of reasons). What does envisioning a future with jobs have to do with the US?
> Perhaps European writers envisioned a future where the life of the upper classes was available to everyone - a life of leisure, a utopia without work.
Perhaps? I'm not aware of many European writers who categorically only wrote books like that.
And there are plenty of US writers who wrote about future societies about a life of leisure and a utopia without work. Most of the science fiction I've read isn't even particularly about jobs or work. Characters having work to do is often only tangential to what they're trying to accomplish - who would listen to Elijah Bailey and why would he bother doing what he was doing if he wasn't a detective?
> Whereas the American's envisioned a future in which there was always work because there was an ever expanding frontier (space) that needed conquering.
Europe conquered much of the known world before the US was even a thing. WW2 was started by the country I'm from because we felt like we had to conquer all of Europe. Meanwhile Japan was in the middle of conquering much of Asia, brutally.
In fairness, typically people imagined a utopian future where nobody worked. The strategic goal, never yet realised although AI might finally manage it, is to push people out of the workforce rather than in to it. Signing your daughter up to be a wage slave may be an improvement on the 1950s it isn't really the sort of thing that makes a good long term goal.