Work Mate Marry Love, Debora L. Spar
Work Mate Marry Love, Debora L. Spar
List: $42.99 | Sale: $30.10
Club: $21.49

Work Mate Marry Love
How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny

Author: Debora L. Spar

Narrator: Tanya Eby

Unabridged: 10 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/18/2020


Synopsis

A crucial guide to life before―and after―Tinder, IVF, and robots.What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created?In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

About Debora L. Spar

Debora L. Spar is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and the former president of Barnard College and Lincoln Center. Her previous books include Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg on March 16, 2021

"I believe that at one time they were actually COMPELLED to do some such work, because they, especially the women, got so ugly and produced such ugly children if their disease was not treated sharply, that the neighbours couldn't stand it. However, I'm happy to say that all that is gone by now; the......more

Goodreads review by Brian on January 18, 2021

Very thought provoking and will challenge a lot of ideas you might have about how and why the norms of society change. Spar puts forth the idea that in the history of humankind most of our basic social norms have been brought on by technology: the plow and advent of agriculture led to the origins of......more

Goodreads review by Catalina on January 29, 2025

I found this an interesting read. The author looks back at history and explains how technology shaped the way we live starting back with the Neolithic period, present and the future. It looked at the opportunities created, the shift in the norms of society, changes in the roles of men and women…......more