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."

Comments

It's called Shift Work

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:It's called Shift Work

[Oswald McWeany]

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!

Highly unlikely that would happen.

Instead Quintillionaires would hire prostitutes to do that for them.

sure, just like fusion power

[cellocgw]

People said that back in the 1950s too. Then along came this thing called greed, and its enabler called power.

Re:sure, just like fusion power

[dpilot]

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.

Re:sure, just like fusion power

[zifn4b]

I so wish I had mod points for you. However, I am sad to say you time frame is off a bit. It was John Maynard Keynes that first made this prediction in the 1930's actually. In the 1950's science and science fiction were both forecasting that technology advances would eliminate our need to work. Jack Ma is a tad bit late to the party. A better question he could answer is: why is it taking longer than predicted?

Re:sure, just like fusion power

[torkus]

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.

Not true (for the US)

[houghi]

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.

Re:Not true (for the US)

[omnichad]

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.

Re:Not true (for the US)

[Bozzio]

Hear hear.

I've been alternating between working for 1-2 years and then taking a sabbatical for 1-2 years for a while now and it's great. I can afford this because I don't have any debt. I don't have any debt because I don't own a house, a car, or any other luxuries. I live very frugally. I've chosen this lifestyle because typically after about 18 months in the workplace my mental health suffers.

I'm not suggesting the entire world adopts this approach, I'm just saying this it what works for me.

Now, I'm a software engineer so when I work it pays well. This allows me to have a 50/50 work/sabbatical balance. But, I often wonder if other careers could swing this as well but with a different ratio. I believe the key is not living beyond your means.

I'm fortunate in that, where I live, I can get by without a car or a house. However, where I grew up (North America) this just isn't possible. In order to be part of the workforce you often need a very expensive minimum set of equipment. You can't get to work without a car. There is no affordable lodging near work.

So, in addition to changing the length of the typical workweek, I think we should also be changing how people access work.

This isn't the 50s anymore. Houses and cars aren't cheap anymore.

Re:Not true (for the US)

[Anonymous Coward]

Shorter life expectancy, lower standard of living, lower levels of satisfaction with life, higher levels of obesity, lower levels of literacy, that the kind of 'better off' you're talking about?

Let's deal with the real world, not the one you'd like to be real, shall we?

Re: Not true (for the US)

[ooloorie]

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.

Re:Not true (for the US)

[rbrander]

If one applies that logic to food, which you actually need more desperately than shelter (in most weather situations) then you are in your concept of "infinite debt" until you own a farm.
More than a farm, actually; you aren't free of purchasing SOME needs from the rest of society until you have a medieval freehold (house, farm, livestock, smelter and blacksmithery, forest and sawmill, fiber crops and weaving factory...I could go on).
Your viewpoint is made clearer by your insistence on not just owning a condo or shares in a building co-op, but "your own land, free and clear" which is why I brought up the medieval freehold.
You are welcome to emulate that with a Unibomber shack and a large garden. Me, I think I can trust society and that a member of it with little pieces of paper that say "actually the world DOES owe me a living, I saved for 30 years and can now pay my rent forever with my pension", has a safer hold on life than the shack-guy.

This has been predicted forever

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:This has been predicted forever

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:This has been predicted forever

[AthanasiusKircher]

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?

Re:This has been predicted forever

[sl3xd]

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.

I'm already doing that!

[tylersoze]

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?

Re:BS

[Oswald McWeany]

Fortunately, in 40 years I'll be almost 80, and only 20 years away from being able to finally retire.

What technical revolutions started the world wars?

[i_ate_god]

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.

Re:What technical revolutions started the world wa

[orzetto]

World War 2 was started because Germany wanted a chunk of land that was predominately German

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).

Re:I thought robots were supposed to do everything

[torkus]

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.

I don't think Keynes

[rsilvergun]

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.