We live in a period of deep revolutions. It is today an industrial one. The book « the end of history » of Fukuyama didn’t take enough into account a fundamental approach of the human species : the materialistic view described by Heraclitus stating that « we don’t go twice in the same river ». The law of human order is often led by chaos. The empirists Locke and Hume stated that, but Hegel tried to give to this illogical order a logical approach with his vision of the reason in history. That is the reason why we can say that the end of the XXth century led to a terrible illusion, saying that the end of history had arrived.
The expansion of Islamism and the rise of China have been the two main events of the XXIst century. We are also witnessing the great return of Asia. But the fact is that we are also witnessing an important industrial revolution, with the appearance of the Internet, of new kind of technologies (laptops, smartphones…) and of course the development of artificial intelligence. That is the reason why we need to think about the economical heart of this century, the industrial revolution.
We can say that economics is one of the main tendencies that is leading politics. Even the French Revolution was caused by the rise of the bourgeoisie linked to the development of mobiliar economy. But, as stated Marx, the economy is led by science, the first measure of human progress. Condorcet said that « humanities has their limits, science doesn’t have ». The question is raised about the new power of geeks, of overspecialized technicians that will control the progress of the XXIst century.
There will be revolutions in the job market. Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The end of work, is telling about the fact cashiers and many other jobs will disappear. In fact it has always been this way. First great riots in the XIXth century have spread because the machine were replacing the jobs there were doing. But the fact very qualified jobs, as lawyers, accountants or doctors can be partially replaced by machines spreads a lot of issues reliant to these subjects are very important.
Philosophers has thought a lot about these subjects. Plato said that, at the entrance of his school the Academy, « no one can unter here if he isn’t a geometre ». Aristotle theorized the difference between work and labor : the first one is what the humans are accomplishing, while the labor is the sum of efforts made by the humans to earn their lives. Hannah Arendt will inspire later from this vision to disinguish between the homo faber and homo laborans. The vision of Aristotle is stating an optimist vision of things : the fact the machines can replace the human can give them more time to accomplish what they really want in life, or to practice otium (which means leasure spent on getting more knowledge, or studying).
Theologians also have their vision about the concept of work. The Bible stated that mankind would work to survive « at the sweat of their forehead ». Anyway Jesus, in his parabole of the talents, gave an approach more focused on work, which is making developped what is stating in the head. In the Jewish approach, God is retiring to let the elected people work for his advent. That is the reason why we can say that religion has developped in many parts the approach of work.
If we go back to the initial subject, we can say that many old questions have a renewed vitality. The new technologies spread many questions about ethics, the sense of progress, economical theories, the evolution of political ideologies, that give to old philosophical thesis we tought they would be solved to come back again. As Alain Badiou said, « philosophy will have a real role in the XXIst century to build a new universality ». He talked as a marxist, anyway it states well that the elaboration of new concepts (Deleuze told that philosophy was the « creation of concepts ») linked to this new era can have real influence on political or economical ideologies, for instance. This indirect influence is not really neutral.
The observer 