As amazing as technology's ability to solve our problems is its inability to solve our problems. (Its tendency to create new problems is a subject best left for another day.)
Last month the Asahi Shimbun Globe supplement heralded "the day housework is no more." We're almost there. One article among several is titled "My butler is a robot." Those few short words usher us simultaneously backward and forward in time — backward to an age when the poor served the rich, forward to a universal aristocracy, living like lords without exploiting or demeaning anyone.
"The technology is evolving rapidly," the writer notes, stating the obvious, and it won't be long, surely, before robots release us altogether from whatever drudgery remained to plague us after indoor plumbing, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, rice cookers and so on liberated us from the worst of it beginning a century or so ago.