"Should the advent of the smart machine be taken as an invitation to relax the demands upon human comprehension and critical judgment?"

Here Zuboff begins with a commonly feared side effect of technology--the loss of fundamental understanding of a task by human workers because the task is performed by a machine, making the once required human thought and labor unnecessary.  An example is the fear that students will lose the ability to do long multiplication due to constant use of calculators.  It is the fear that the mind's acuity will be drastically and dreadfully reduced by desuetude, and that future generations of workers, save those at the highest level of command and those who must design and maintain the technology, will become zombies, only knowing how to get the machines started but not comprehending what the machine is doing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 "Does the massive diffusion of computer technology throughout our workplaces necessarily entail an equally dramatic loss of meaningful employment opportunities?"

In other words, as workers lose the challenges they ordinarily would face on the job to computer technology, will their lives become meaningless at work? Also, will we come to see so very small a number of jobs that are not completely accomplished by automation that almost everyone in the working class will face a meaningless career? Many already live this description with jobs that require only the push of a button or the staring at a computer screen throughout the entire day.
 
 
 

 Zuboff offers an answers to the above questions with these alternate scenarios:

1)     Labor does indeed become not only more routine (even more so than the assembly lines that arose from the industrial revolution) but also isolated and shallow. The lack of depth and need for thinking ability will seal an attitude of inferiority for workers as computers grow to have not just more precision but, overall, more knowledge. This situation, according to Zuboff reinforces the lack of meaning in the work, and the laborers become belligerent or totally indifferent and resort even to drug abuse.
 
    OR

2)     Laborers always stay above their technology. That is, as computers take over more tasks on higher levels of thought, those workers who run the computers can concentrate on the even more abstract details of their work. Employers begin to train a workforce to "understand and manipulate" the information they deal with instead of simply producing the information. Jobs entail less specific but more difficult material because of the wider scope of their descriptions. A worker, for example may no longer be only concerned with the function of one machine but with the maintenance and interpretation of the work done by an entire area of the plant.