Once there was work, and what we understood as work was what we were paid to be doing. Today there is what we do, and sometimes the benefits to our employer of what we do are unclear. Sometimes it is difficult to think of what we do as work, and sometimes there seems to be so much work to shift that we feel overwhelmed.

Once we may have left our work behind. Today we take it with us with our mobile phones, our pagers, and our computers. Our working life is woven, warp across weft, into the texture of our domestic existence.

Just as motorways created more traffic, technology has created more industries and yet more work. There seems to be an exponential relationship between what can be described loosely as “progress” and work.

In the first part of the twentieth century this might have seemed a good thing, because the regulated structure and factory-based nature of manufacturing employment dictated that more work equated to more jobs. These jobs were needed for growing populations, boosted by health improvements and as yet unchecked by reliable and widely available contraception.

But the last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a dismantling of this structure and an erosion of the concept of the job, that neat package of work that had defined much of the employment of the previous two hundred to three hundred years.

Such changes have led to a belief that in the new century the influence of computers is creating a watershed in the way we work as fundamental as that of the Industrial Revolution and the earlier Agrarian Revolution ten thousand years ago, when people developed the ability to raise crops.

The craziness is that some of these highly paid individuals are working such long hours they rarely have the opportunity to step outside their jobs and enjoy a moment's leisure. There used to be parts of our lives we could devote solely to play and leisure but these precious days, once sacrosanct, have been invaded by the new communications of the work place. So often today, play is no longer divorced from work.

Only those portfolio workers who can demonstrate consistent employment over several years are going to be regarded by lending institutions on equal terms with those who have so-called permanent jobs. The infrastructure supporting the way we work has not caught up with this technological revolution, placing extraordinary pressures on the working lives of those in temporary or short-term positions.

Teachers will still be needed to teach, but they may no longer stand, autocratically, in front of classrooms dispensing knowledge in syllabus-driven packages. The role will be modeled around the needs of the children.

Command- and-control learning produces boredom and unrest. It closes minds. As I once heard a conference speaker say, children go into school as question marks and leave as periods.

Real life isn't like this. Left to ourselves we are open to hundreds of influences. A day develops. We may grasp just one of a myriad of colourful threads and we begin to weave, picking up information and under- standing as we go along.

The more we learn, the more we want to learn. We may need guidance, and one of our guides may well be a teacher, but another may be a parent or a book or a TV program or a movie or a game or a conversation with friends.

Don Tapscott says that these children display different attitudes to their parents, rejecting the idea of conventional employment. “Every kid with a computer is creating his own radio station,” he says. “They want to share the wealth they create. Tell them you'll give them a job and a corner office? I don't think so. Offer them lifelong, full time exclusive employment? I don't think so. This huge demographic change is like a tidal wave. These kids are going to shake the windows and rattle the values of every company...”

We cannot rely on employers. Most employers have only ever seen workers as costs. Any self-made employer will remember the cost-benefit equation he makes when considering the need to employ someone else. The employer may develop social cares. He may begin to identify with his employees, but, when the chips are down, in times of financial crisis, it is every man and woman for themselves.