单选题
First of course, it is plain that in the year 2010 everyone will have at his elbow several times more mechanical energy than he has today.
Second, there will be advances in biological knowledge as farreaching as those that have been made in physics. We are only beginning to learn that we can control our biological environ-ment as well as our physical one. Starvation has been prophesied twice to a growing world population: by Malthus about 1800, by Crookes about 1900. It was headed off the first time by taking agriculture to America and the second time by using the new fertilizers. In the year 2010 star-vation will be headed off by the control of the diseases and the heredity (遗传性) of plants and animals—by shaping our own biological environment.
And third, I come back to the haunting theme of automation. The most common species in the factory today is the man who works or minds a simple machine—the operator. By the year 2010, he will be as extinct as the hand-loom weaver and the dodo. The repetitive tasks of indus-try will be taken over by the machines, as the heavy tasks were taken over long ago; and the mental tedium (疲劳，沉闷) will go the way of physical exhaustion. Today we still distinguish, even among repetitive jobs, between the skilled and the unskilled, but in the year 2010 all repetition will be unskilled. We simply waste our time if we oppose this change, it is as inevitable as the year 2010 itself.