But the absurdity I meant to highlight here is that if work is progressive, if we make our jobs more efficient with technology, we're undercutting ourselves and making us obsolete.

Those Bible verses, then, are excellent illustrations of how the Bible could hardly have had a divine, all-seeing author. A deity would have foreseen this problem with the rise of high technology. But of course ancient people had no such prescience. So they urged workers to work hard because human labour was indeed necessary back then to keep civilization going. As I said, they had mainly tools rather than machines, and tools are useless without human input.

The question is whether people should keep working hard even as machines and computers are outclassing us and taking our jobs. This is like the corporate situation in which the doomed worker trains the very person who's about to replace him. It's quite ironic and absurd.