Edited sentence: All which can be traced back to the vision of one incredibly influential but still somewhat unappreciated man, Frederick Winslow Taylor.Do we live to work, or do we work to live.For an example, look at the rapid pace at which voice-recognition call-center technology has been adopted globally in customer service applications.So, the situation at the beginning of the 21st century is an uneasy balance between man and machine, with, looking to the near future, machines seeming to hold many advantages and the widespread implementation of modern day Taylorism can be shown to be at the root of the explosion of productivity around the world, particularly in the United States, to the point that it is forcing a reevaluation in the nature of work and the meaning of life.Some even are beginning to say that the 21st century may be the century in which wage labor becomes no longer necessary.The battle is playing itself out as more and more people realize the roots of the 'jobless recovery' may be new technology that will eventually, make all but the most skilled of workers, those with the most highly advanced technology skills, obsolete.These tools have enabled an explosion of productivity that has made 21st century businesses already strikingly more productive than 20th century ones.This point can be made quite eloquently by simply looking at the number of new technologies in the pipeline, at the verge of maturity, and at the number of human beings each one replaces shortly after it is made available