单项选择题

TEXT B
An overt impact of modem information systems concerns the individual’s standard and style of living. Information systems affect the scope and quality of health care, make social services more equitable, enhance personal comfort, provide a greater measure of safety and mobility, and extend the variety of leisure forms at one’s disposal. More subtly but equally important, they also affect the content and style of an individual’s work and in so doing perturb the social and legal practices and conventions to which one is accustomed. New kinds of information products and media necessitate a redefinition of the legal conventions regulating the ownership of products of the human intellect. Moreover, massive data-collecting systems bring into sharp focus the elusive borderline between the common good and personal privacy, calling the need to safeguard stored data against accidental or illegal access, disclosure, or misuse.
Individuals cannot ignore the impact of automation and information-processing systems on their skills and jobs. Information technology makes obsolete, in part or in entirety, many human functions: first mechanical and repetitive tasks were affected; now clerical and paraprofessional tasks are being automated; and eventually highly skilled and some professional functions will be made unnecessary. Individuals performing these functions face the probability of shorter periods of employment and the need to adapt or change their skills. As technologies, including information technology, grow more sophisticated, their learning curves stretch or the required skills become narrower; continuing training and education are likely to become a way of life for both employee and employer. Unlike the slow, gradual evolution of human labour in past generations, present day changes are occurring rapidly and with little warning. Unless society members anticipate these effects and prepare to cope with them mentally and in practice, job dislocations and forced geographic relocations may prove traumatic for employees and their families.
The perhaps more fundamental issue of paramount long-term significance for society has to do with the well-being of the human spirit in an increasingly knowledge-intensive environment. In such an environment, knowledge is the principal and perhaps most valuable currency. The growing volume and the rate of obsolescence of knowledge compel the individual to live in the continuous presence of, and frequent interaction with, information resources and systems. Effective use of these resources and systems may be a modern definition of literacy, while the absence of such a skill may very well result in intellectual and possibly economic poverty and inequity. There is a real danger that humans, unwilling or incapable or not given access to information, may be relegated to an existence that falls short of the human potential.
This passage is mainly about ______.