Rifkin points out a Japanese government research program to develop computer that mimic the human brain. Called Real-World Program, the project's mission is to develop "flexible information processing," which performs intuitive thinking of the sort that people use when they make decisions. The ultimate goal, according to Rifkin, is to create intelligent machines capable of reading text, understanding complex speech, interpreting body language and anticipating behavior.
-- Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (p. 61)

According to Rifkin, the man responsible for putting efficiency at the center of the American work was Frederick W. Taylor, whose principles of "scientific management" became the standard for organizing the workplace at the turn of the century.
Taylor timed each worker's task and broke the performance down into units that could be
continually improved by increments of fractions of a second. By calculating peak performance
and knowing what specific points in the work process could be optimized, Taylor could
recommend to managers how save time -- and time of course, equals money. Taylor blurred the lines between people and machines by treating people as automatons whose performance could be tweaked with just the right adjustment here, a little elbow grease there -- paving the way for the cyborg dystopia we could all be living in a few years.
-- Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (p. 72)
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