“Work” is a set of actions to create “Value”. Who creates the “Value”, for whom, and in doing so, is “Value” destroyed for someone? --This question can be fairly applied to all 3 phases.
If we were to time-travel and talk about this to people, yes they would present differing attitudes and conceptions. For ideas on good and bad, Phase 1 would appeal to Nature - sun, rain, animals, plants etc., Phase 2 to human-defined ideas of God & religions and Phase 3 to money, utilitarianism, free-market economy etc. But basically, we can decide “Work or Anti-Work” by considering the “Value” created and destroyed, in all phases.
It seems we have created structures that reduce (or seem to, anyways) our dependency on other people. Engineering point of view is, people are unreliable, machines/computers are precise, so let’s optimize for reliability by automating as much as possible. But when tech applications enter the space of judgement, ethics, values, “reliability” of machine logic seems to take a backseat: it is hard to teach machines emotions, conscience, but this is present in people, yet we are saying “keep automating as much as possible” - revealing that the optimization was primarily for low costs, higher profits - reliability was a convenient side-effect, good for advertising the idea that the logical world of engineering can solve all of humanity’s problems.
We need humanity in order to solve humanity’s problems.
Link where Hans continues: On the problem of defining "Humane" - #4 by hans