consider this amazing process of applied knowledge in Western 
civilization, Shakespeare’s As You Like It  provides a good deal 
to think about. His forest of Arden is just such a golden world 
of translated benefits and joblessness as we are now entering 
via the gate of electric automation.

     It is no more than one would expect that Shakespeare 
should have understood the Forest of Arden as an advance 
model of the age of automation when all things are 
translatable into anything else that is desired:

     And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
     Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
     Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
     I would not change it.