Slashdot Mirror
Jack Ma: In 30 Years People Will Work Four Hours a Day and Maybe Four Days a Week (cnbc.com)
There could be benefits from artificial intelligence, self-made billionaire, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said, as people are freed to work less and travel more. From a report: "I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week," Ma said. "My grandfather worked 16 hours a day in the farmland and [thought he was] very busy. We work eight hours, five days a week and think we are very busy." He added that if people today are able to visit 30 places, in three decades it will be 300 places. Still, Ma said the rich and poor -- the workers and the bosses -- will be increasingly defined by data and automation unless governments show more willingness to make "hard choices." "The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution."
People said that back in the 1950s too. Then along came this thing called greed, and its enabler called power.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Do you know when the 40-hour work week began? Railroad workers finally got it in 1916; it became a general part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937. Most people were working 10-16 hour days.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
there will be one poor chap working 16 hours a day for 6 days a week for a minimum wage
No, there'll be two of them working 8 hours a day, 3 days a week at two different jobs. Full time employees generally expect benefits.
actually, it was the labor unions that enabled the 40 hour work week, not the gibberish you just shot out your ass.
The European work week is all over the map. The US, on the other hand, is simply about OECD average, similar to Japan, Ireland, and Italy.
https://www.usnews.com/news/be...
And despite average working hours, US wages are among the top in the world.
But, hey, don't let facts rain on your anti American parade.
I'm pretty sure Poland was not predominantly German. You are thinking of the Sudetenland, which western powers were all too happy to hand over to Hitler on a silver platter (along with the rest of Czechoslovakia).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
You read too many jilted newspapers and fail to understand market dynamics.
Oil is cheap now because of an oversupply.
Discover of new oil sources isn't driving the over-supply. Instead, it's new technology (and the previously much higher value of oil) driving the exploitation of existing, known fields that were previously not economical to tap.
It's also removal of some restrictions on new wells, fracking, and other techniques.
Combine that with a newfound US refusal to depend so heavily on oil from OPEC has led to a price war in essence. OPEC upped their production to force over-supply and a reduction in prices which was intended to drive the North American producers (which typically have significantly higher production expenses per barrel) out of business. Unfortunately for them, many of those producers already invested the large capital and instead dug in their heels and worked to be more cost efficient. They generally succeeded. Now even as OPEC reduces output to try and bring the prices back up, they're on the losing side of the game after having been used to virtually limitless income in the prior years.
Even with that in mind, the move to renewables is well underway. If people would get un-stupid, we'd combine that with nuclear and call it a day for powering the grid and work to replace our ICE vehicles more rapidly with EVs.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
A good article on the subject is at PolitiFact
The TL;DR version is that the AFL-CIO started campaigning for a 40-hour week in 1886. There was a workplace explosion three days after the AFL-CIO's announcement, killing several, and resulting in a few trials & executions. That brought the 40-hour work week into international news, where it remained.
The Ford Motor company famously introduced the policy in 1914, but wasn't the first company to do so. A couple of years later, a strike by railroad workers crippled the nation's commerce, so the government mandated they get overtime pay in 1916. (This is not unlike strikes by longshoremen in recent years).
Overall, the labor unions deserve most of the credit, for doggedly pursuing the idea and seeing progress for nearly sixty years.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.