 Dwi'n ddod i'r Gweithio Prif Weiniddo, sy'n ddod i'r cyfnod yma. Felly, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r thymau o'r ffwrdd, bydd yn ddod i'r Gweithio Prif Weiniddo, ac bydd'r ffodol. Y ffwrdd ymddir yw'r Prif Weiniddo, sy'n ddod i'r ffwrdd, yn gwybod i'r gweithio'r ffwrdd. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r miliwn i'r cyfnod sy'n gyffredigu mecanolio. Yn gwybod i'r gweithio? How will they occupy the vacant towers when they sink demoralised into alcoholism and crime? This was in fact one of the reviewers of our book, Judge Richard Posner, in the US, speculated that precisely this would happen in our projected utopia. People would sleep in, brawl and get drunk. Now, in how much is enough, Robert and I argued that the decline of work is a cause for rejoicing, not dread. Because what it really means, as Kane said, is that mankind is solving its economic problem. To an ever increasing degree, we are doing things because we want to, not because we have to. And that must be a good thing. So our main problem now is a technical one, of distributing the expanding leisure among the population as a whole, i'w ddigwyddio'r ffordd o'r llei'r wahanol, i'w ddigwyddio'r ffordd o'r llei'r rhaid. Ond y ffordd yn erbyn yn edrych, ac yn ymddangos cyflotyddol. Felly mae'n ffordd o ddigwyddio'r ffordd o ffordd o ddegwyddio a'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r llei'r ffordd o'r llei. Mae'r ysgol yn gwahanol o'r ddweud ac o'r ffordd o'r llei o'r ddylun i'r ddweud. Mae'r deimlo yw'r mewn ddweudio'r llawr. Mae'r lleiwhau yw y Cymru yn y gallu gwirionedd gan gynnig o'r rhan o'r adref ychydig o'r argyrcwm eich bateriaeth. Ddyn nhw'n gynghwyl yn y prydwyddoedd, mae ydych yn meddwl o'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio yn ei wneud o'r holl. Oni'r hyn yn y llwy fydd yn digwyddol i'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r wneud. We play squash in order to keep fit. We party in order to network. We invest quality time in our children in order to keep them sweet. No wonder a life of leisure fills us with dread. So how can we recover genuine leisure? A first step, I suggest, would be to recall the original meaning of the word. Leisure, in the ancient world, schole in Greek, otium in Latin, was not just time off work, but a distinct form of activity in its own right. It was what was done freely for its own sake, rather than for the sake of something else. Leisure was a privilege of landed gentlemen. Slaves proverbially lacked it, as to a lesser degree did paid labourers, whose waking hours were devoted to servicing the needs of others. Athenians called work of this sort banausic, or mechanical, a word suggestive of civility and stultification. Recall those arts mechanical which tend to deform the body, wrote Aristotle, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind. Now, the Greeks were well aware that slaves and workmen had to rest, perhaps even unwind occasionally, but that for them was something altogether distinct from leisure. Recreation, as we might now call it, was simply the flip side of work, a necessary respite from its pain and constraint. Leisure, in the true sense, had nothing restorative about it. It took place beyond the work, recreation cycle. It was human activity unleashed for many external purpose. Leisure could thus be strenuous in the highest degree, indeed far more strenuous than work, without losing its leisure character. The modern identification of leisure with recreation, as embodied in the leisure centre, simply shows how far the concept has strayed from its original and deeper meaning. Leisure in the ancient world took many forms. For most Athenians it was synonymous with athletics and oratory, the conventional occupations of the property delete. But for a dissident minority, leisure meant philosophy, the love of wisdom, an activity quite unlike the academic discipline that now bears its name. Philosophy was free, open-ended speculation, unconstrained by dogma or money. Plato contrasts it with the law, in which the goal is to win your case and win it quickly. Aristotle describes it as a celestial activity, full of pleasures, amazing in purity and intensity. Its very uselessness is its glory, he says, for it does not become liberal and exalted minds to think continually of what is useful. This is how we should envisage leisure, not as jacuzes and flat screen TVs. Now, the classical idea of leisure that I've just outlined is a hard sell in today's world, as Robert and I found out after we wrote our book. For a start it's unappealingly high-minded. There's no room in it for the artistic pursuits that we value so highly today, let alone for good, plain fun. And, of course, it was an elite privilege. Aristotle's celestial philosophers would have lived on the labour of others, mainly women and slaves. Now, all this is true, but it's also beside the point. In an affluent and diverse society, leisure needn't and shouldn't be limited to philosophising or confined to landed gentlemen. It can and should be open to everyone and consist in all manner of pursuits. But the objection to our proposal ran deeper than this. There was a sense that it just wasn't serious, wasn't real politics. In our utilitarian public culture, calling on people to do something simply because it's good to do is somehow disreputable. Anything not done for the sake of something else carries a suspicion of vanity and self-indulgence. Now, in fact, of course, the exact opposite is true. The real vanity of vanities is doing everything for the sake of something else. This is the state of mind of the compulsive investor, who, as Cain's put it, does not love his cat but his cat's kittens, nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on forever forward to the end of captain. We must free ourselves from the tyranny of useful activity. All that is deepest and most serious in life is useless. Sorry, that sounds like a bit of a flip paradox, but I mean it quite literally. I think it's a sign of the corruption of our moral language by utilitarianism that the word useless has a dismissive overturning. No, that's useless, worthless. But of course, in fact, useless literally just means without use. And I think it's self-evident that the most important things in life, I mean love, art, truth, are useless in that sense. I mean they may be incidentally useful, but that's not why they're valuable. Another problem confronting me and Robert was one of terminology. In our book, we define leisure in a slightly unusual technical sense to refer to what is done specifically for its own sake, not as a means to something else. So leisure in this sense could consist of paid work, provided it's undertaken primarily for its intrinsic rewards and not as a means of making money. So many writers, for instance, would carry on writing even if they aren't nothing for it or could earn more doing something else. They are engaged in leisure in our sense of the term. Conversely, many leisure activities are not leisure in our sense, either because they're undertaken instrumentally, playing tennis to lose weight, for instance, or because they're too passive to counter action in the full sense at all. Now, if leisure is defined in this way, it's clear that our journey to a more leisure future could take one or both of two forms. We could reduce the amount of time spent in paid work as compared to unpaid but intrinsically valuable activity, or we could come to see paid work itself as intrinsically valuable, as good work, in President Higgins' phrase. This latter development is arguably already underway. More and more jobs in our part of the world have a vocational aspect. They are viewed by those who do them not just as a living but as rewarding, fulfilling, etc. Now, there is an element of false consciousness in this. I would call a human resources manager at Orange who claimed to live and breathe the brand. And there's a lot of this kind of talk in management literature. But it's at least plausible that a lot of modern jobs are more intellectually and spiritually satisfying than the monotonous physical labour that constituted work for most people in the past and still does in most parts of the world. Now, if this hunch is correct, then what we may be seeing is not so much the displacement of work by leisure as they're coming together in a new work-leisure hybrid. I can take my job, for instance, I teach philosophy at Exeter University. This time I'm teaching four hours a week. Those four hours constitute my duties. The rest of the time I'm essentially doing things that I want to do and that I probably would be doing anyway, even if they weren't part of my job. So is this work or is it leisure? The distinction no longer seems a particularly interesting one. Now, lecturing is not a new profession, of course, but the number of university lecturers has expanded enormously over the past 40 odd years, as has the number of people employed in intellectual services in general. So I think we're seeing more and more of this kind of work in the affluent world. In short, whether we treat automation as an opportunity to expand leisure at the expense of work or to liberate work from the tyranny of the job, as the social critic Friedrich Hof Bergman put it, doesn't make all that much difference ultimately. The important point is that we are, well, we're in a position to spend an increasing proportion of our waking time doing things that we want to do and not things that we have to do. And we only have to hope that a hankering after the lost virtues of hard work, the old Adam in us, as Cain's put it, doesn't hinder us from claiming the leisure that's ours for the taking. So I offer these brief reflections as an example of how we might go about undoing what President Higgins has called the disjunction between mainstream economic theory and ethical reasoning. Without ethical guidance, wrote the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the rationality of science is like the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids. Much the saying could be said about the rationality of the modern world economy. The organisation of means is impressively sophisticated, but the ultimate end, the ever-increasing expansion of output, is insane. Modern economic theory participates in this insanity by bracketing out questions concerning the ends of life. Our book puts those questions back at the centre. It aims to revive the older idea of economics as a moral science, a science of human beings in communities, not of interacting robots.