Nearly fifty years ago, at the dawn of the computer revolution, the philosopher and psychologist Herbert Marcuse made a prophetic observation – one that has come to haunt our society as we ponder the transition into the Information Age: "Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time: the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be a radical transvaluation of values, and a mode of existence incompatible with the traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility."

— The end of work by Jeremy Rifkin (Page 221)