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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."
No one will have full time employment, everybody will be working multiple jobs just to rent some shitty hole in the wall and buy trash food
Meanwhile Quintillionaires will be jerking themselves off in space
FUTURE!
In Europe we are working on it (35 workweek. 30 days holiday. Sick days are not holidays, maternity and paternity leave, ...)
In the US, if the current situation is any indication there will be one poor chap working 16 hours a day for 6 days a week for a minimum wage and all the rest will be called unemployed slackers and get nothing.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In 40 years....
1. People will work 50-60 hours a week if they want a job.
2. Most other people will work at call, via apps that will post x number of people needed for said task. It will be cheap work. No benefits. People will fight for it. More niche work will follow the Rover & Uber app model. Workers will be able to take jobs, earn reps. And hirers will post listing that will require a certain rep/xp level.
It will suck....
We will have transitioned to the neo-Feudalism economy.
Dual-income households only served to inflate the number hours needed to make a living family wage (to nearly double). All this new wave will do is halve the number of employable people, and the remaining will barely get by.
World War 1 was started by an assassination that was used to impose unrealistic ultimatums on other countries, that triggered a cascade of mutual defence treaties to kick in and then everyone was fighting.
World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German and no one wanted to give it to them so they took it by force, which made everyone angry, and the Japanese used this brouhaha as cover for its own imperialist agenda.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
What's new is the MBA. It gives greed the tools to look under more rocks for coins to scrape into their own coffers. Or another way of looking at it, the MBA enhances the ability of the greedy to pull threads out of the fabric of society to feather their own already-opulent nests.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Markets don't exist independent of consumers. The 1% are allowed to exist because consumers decided that it was ok to sell their neighbors down river as long as they got a pair of jeans for two dollars less by outsourcing the means of production to countries where some fish with their rice was still considered the high life.
You people who act like the 1% was just born out of thin air and wall street policy are likely feeding the 1% instead of voting with your dollars. If all you anti-1%ers would vote with your wallets then your communities would change.
Indeed, in 1930 John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by 2030 we'd by working 15 hours days.
Keynes predicted that this would be accomplished through a 4- to 8-fold increase in worker productivity. Well, we're basically on track to the 8-fold productivity goal by 2030, but everyone is still working 40-hour weeks. Why?
It's easy to say (as some posts here already have) that from a practical standpoint our cost of living has increased. if we all wanted the kind of lifestyle from 1930s tech, we'd likely to be able to survive on a lot less money.
But that's a facile argument: even if someone wanted to live a 1930s lifestyle, how many employers really want someone who will only work 15 hours/week? Sure, there are plenty of part-time jobs, but they're generally minimum wage or not much higher. Unless you're a senior person who can dictate your own hours or have a long-established career that allows you to "consult" for only 15 hours/week, it's not really feasible in American culture to even make that choice.
So where did the productivity go? That's the real question. Keynes assumed that the profits from the excess productivity would be distributed throughout the workforce, thereby making it feasible for workers to gradually reduce the worktime from 40 hours to 15 hours each week. Instead, the vast majority of the excess productivity profits have gone to benefit the owners and executives of companies. And to live a normal "middle-class" lifestyle of the 2010s, one still has to work 40 hours/week (or more). CEOs in the mid-1900s made perhaps 20 times the average worker salary. Today they make over 300 times the average worker salary.
So, no offense to Jack Ma, but what exactly does he think will happen in the next 30 years that will break the trend of excess productivity and profits going to the upper classes, rather than being distributed more evenly and allowing less worktime?
One of the better metrics I've seen for the level of greed and money/power consolidation is the ratio of executive pay to average salary in companies. While it used to be ~10x, last I looked it was more like 100x.
One can also look at the 1%-ers (and even the 5-10%-ers) and the enormously disproportionate amount of the global finances they control.
The 30 year guess is kind of ironic to me personally. Somewhere between 25 and 30 years ago I 'discovered' robots and all the amazing things they could do in factories...replacing people or at least large parts of their jobs. I was excited and in my naive young mind though 'oh wow, with all these robots to do the work people will get to work less but make the same money because the company can make the same amount of things for less work and people have more time to do things with their family' ... I believe I wrote a short essay about it for some english class even.
Fast forward almost the 30 predicted years this article mentions and ... we're in exactly the OPPOSITE position (at least in the US). People are working substantially MORE hours and generally being paid LESS. A MUCH larger portion of the country is receiving welfare in one sort or another all while healthcare costs are ballooning and things like pensions simply don't exist outside of government jobs.
I'm not sure where the cliff in the graph is, but the power consolidation has immensely accelerated in the past few decades to the point that there's zero chance of this prediction coming true unless some great calamity changes things.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Correct. Greed was temporarily suppressed from the '30s to '60s. Then it started to creep back in, and finally Reagan opened the floodgates for Greed in the early '80s, and now here we are, most of us massively more productive and just a few of us reaping the benefits of that increase in productivity.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Predicted the phenomenon that is 'stigginit' or an entire class of people who would consistently vote against their own best interests. In particular he didn't forsee how easy it is for the owner class to put the working class at each other's throats. The concept of a "Welfare Queen" didn't really exist and the southern strategy was a few decades away.
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