Back then he could only use words, albeit very well. Now we can actually witness it live on stage, or on a badly filmed dodgy DVD sold by the polite chinaman in the local car park.

It's funny, us humans are already doing dull and repetitive tasks so that we can have machines to make our lives more interesting.

Isaac Asimov dealt with this 60-70 years ago and did a much more thorough and interesting job doing it.