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."
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!
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
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.
Or as it is currently known, "DMV" or "The Congress"...
Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it might with this next shift.
UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty. Reducing the work week and maybe the societal dependency on a 5-day, 40-hour job that you physically commute to might offer a safety valve. The problem is how you keep business owners from turning this into a gig-economy nightmare where no one has stable income and can't afford to buy anything -- or doesn't feel safe buying things. Consumerism in the US worked previously because people were reasonably sure they would have a steady paycheck to cover expenses, and if they lost their job one would be available at another company. This is a fundamental shift that I don't think we're ready for yet.
Hey I'm already doing that! I mean I really only do about 16 hours of effective work a week, but get paid for the full 40. Is that different than most people really?
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.
There is no fucking way any employer will EVER let someone work 16 hours a day and pay them what they're currently paying them to work 40. It's not so much greed (well, it is) but the view that downtime=loafing=slackers. And slackers don't deserve more money or raises or perks, they need to shape up, get to work, or find some busy work to do. Also, it's the people who are so terrible at their job that it takes them 60 hours a week to do what I can do in 15, but they always look so busy and "persevere" through those tough times (that they caused through their own incompetence and mismanagement) that they get all the raises, bonuses and promotions.
No, it would be nice, but it's a pipe dream that automation will ever do anything except destroy jobs and the middle class.
We've been hearing about this shit since the 60s, and in the meantime the productivity of the average American worker has skyrocketed, while their pay has stagnated or been on decline since some time in the late 70s I believe. What does this trend tell you?
This was all predicted decades ago by many futurist writers, but what they didn't foresee is the greed of the 1% saying no we want it all screw everyone else. That's what all this global far right movement is all about. the rich trying to get the commoner to kill each other off, reduce burden on natural resources. It's the 1% form of population reduction.
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.
"The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II."
Can someone clarify this statement to me? Did people start fighting because they had cars, or what?
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...
Give them something to dream at night while the factories keep churning.
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
The idea only works if you assume all individuals are equally capable, which isn't true. What happens is that labor-saving techniques or machines replace the least skilled workers who were doing 40 hours of work. Some of them can be transitioned to do 40 hours of some other type of work, but others will not be.
Over time what we end up with is a society where some percentage of the population is doing ~40 hours of work per week (and a small few doing even more than that because that's just how they're wired mentally) and the other percentage is doing nothing (or very close to it) because they're incapable of being more productive at some task than a machine.
This is going to be an especially big problem and right now neither of the major parties have a good solution because the political right tends to believe that anyone who can't find work is too lazy and needs to get a job (without recognizing that there are no jobs of which they are capable) and the political left tends to believe that all people are equally capable and that with sufficient training a person who's borderline mentally retarded (or a step above that) can eventually become a neurosurgeon.
Bertrand Russell has a good piece covering this very problem that he wrote almost 100 years ago called In Praise of Idleness. He lays out the argument that if people had more leisure time (as may possible by industrialization) they could devote it to scientific pursuits or towards producing culture. Unfortunately he made the mistake of assuming that everyone was like Bertrand Russell and would kill for extra time to engage in satisfying their own curiosity about the world. In reality a big chunk of those people would just sit on the couch and watch TV with their added time, because they're not mentally capable of advancing our understanding of the universe or creating anything society would deem as artistically worthwhile.
I suppose the good news is that in such a future it becomes reasonably inexpensive to provide for someone who does nothing, because industrialization will drive costs down as production increases. However, the bad news is there isn't a lot of incentive to devote resources to people who can't contribute to society either. Hopefully we take a path that reduces or limits the number of people in that position without inflicting a lot of human suffering to get there. Everything I know about humanity tells me that probably won't be the case.
The alternative scenario is that oil will have run out and become too expensive to fuel even economy eurocars
Current trends are that oil is getting cheaper, and we are finding new sources of oil faster than we are depleting old wells. Cheap plentiful oil is actually a problem, because it makes it harder to transition to carbon-free transportation.
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.
Now: eight hour workdays, one hour commute in each leg. Total: 10 hours.
The Future (TM): four hour workdays, three hour commute in each leg due to greater distances from home and increasing traffic congestions: Total 10 hours.
So, I'd say it could even be worse.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
If I work less than 30 hours a week I loose my working train of thought. I become completely useless. 3 day weekend and I can work the day I come in. 4 day weekend and it takes me 3 days to get back into my projects. I suspect I might be on the extreme end but most non-repetitive jobs have a tipping point where if you take to long away from them you have a significant amount of time required to get back into the routine.
The Elysium scenario is quite plausible. It could easily work as a boat rather than a space station, and there are already some floating communities for the hyper-rich in service (like Utopia). Instead of escaping climate change by leaving the planet, they just move the ship to wherever's pleasant. It also presents a moving and distant target for any group set on retribution. With drone patrol ships/subs/aircraft and spy satellites, it could be very hard to sneak up on a ship.
"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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
All out of mod points
Facts seem to make Libertarians curl up like spiders on a hot stove
You'd think 34 years of tax rates cut in HALF while job income has net DECLINED would have silenced that "all hail the billionaires" chanting but it hasn't.
Just in case you think I was only being facetious.
Simultaneous Interpreting: Some Frequently Asked Questions!
For some reason, this came up in a machine learning resource I consumed recently.
Of course, this job is likely to be impacted fairly significantly, if the computers ever get to the really high level of accuracy required to pass the SALT hurdle.
(Any experienced U.N. translator would get that reference instantaneously.)