eviously thought to require human intelligence. Office workers and managers are now under threat as corporations restructure to take advantage of the huge productivity gains made possible by the new technologies. Just the other day I called a corporation that a good friend of mine works for. Instead of hearing a person's voice answer I was automatically transferred to a machine. It then took me through a variety of options to choose from. It asked me to type in the first three letters of the persons name I wanted to be transferred to. This is a perfect example of how a machine took the place of a persons job. Speech recognition software is becoming more and more popular and like in thi scase is being used to replace human customer service telephonists in many companies. These companies face a simple choice: use the new technology or lose competitive advantage and go out of business. In either case job losses will occur.
             Economists have traditionally argued against the likelihood of the decline of work, believing that productivity gains produce wealth, which is used to expand markets, thereby creating new jobs. Admittedly, this has been the case in the past. For example, when technology began to displace agricultural workers, a new growing sector – manufacturing – was able to absorb those displaced. Then, between the mid fifties and the early eighties, as manufacturing became increasingly automated, displaced factory workers were absorbed into the growing service sector (banking, insurance, accounting, law, airlines, retail, etc). In most modern cities today, nine out of ten jobs are in the service sector.
             Now that the millennium is here, service sector jobs are increasingly falling to advanced technology without the emergence of any new growth areas of the scale required to absorb the redundant office workers. It has been estimated, for example, that human secretaries currently spend more than 45% of their...