A fantastic opportunity to work less

 AI and the future of work, the future of jobs: it’s a fantastic opportunity to change the way we work. And there’s also a real danger, a real danger that we’ll miss this opportunity, that we’ll do what we’ve done in the past when we’ve had technology that has helped us to work more effectively, to work less.

If we look at the history of, say, the last half century, there’ve been three major changes in the technology when we talk about white collar work or even factory work. The first has been the computer: we’ve been able to process things and calculate things, and a lot of the things that we used to do by hand, mathematical calculations, we could outsource to a machine, to a software program. The second has been the telecommunication revolution where distance has collapsed. You could talk to anybody on the other side of the world. You could have access to all the lessons and all the YouTube videos and everything that you ever wanted. The internet and telecommunication: that has been a huge change.

And both of these were catalysts for enormous changes in our productivity. You could produce so much more. You could produce it so much more cheaply. You could really have an abundance of goods. And the way we have reacted to those two major changes has been basically to keep producing, to keep making things.

If we kept making things to give them to people who didn’t have enough, well, that would be worthwhile. We are the privileged people who have access to things, who can make things, now let’s start making things for the rest of the world. But we haven’t done that, and we have our own reasons for not doing that, and we will get back to that.

What we’ve done to ourselves is not really changed the amount of time that we worked. Up until the 1970s, the work week declined in many countries: from six days a week, including the Saturday, maybe 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, then it was limited to eight hours a day. Then we started having Saturday off, and so we had the weekends, we had paid holidays, and all that happened in the 30 years after the second World War. Then around the seventies with the oil shock in the eighties, when we had this kind of liberal way of: we need to make more money, and we had the revolution where we thought that economics was the most important thing, we haven’t really worked less. Many people work 40, 50, 60 hours a week, even when they have very well-paying jobs. And then we also have the people who have to have two jobs or three jobs to make ends meet.

The deep question is, with all this extra technology, why have we not worked less? And the answer is that we’ve kept this competition. We’ve decided to make more stuff. We’ve decided to invent luxury goods, more, more luxury goods. We’ve convinced ourselves that we need more and more and more and more, just as a basis.

So we’ve basically increased our standard, increased the level at which we want to do things and not worked less. Now AI, I think, is an even more powerful change than the ones we had because it goes several levels deeper into how we work. It can really automate large parts of our work. It can organize things for us, it can do things for us. We can really outsource a lot of the way that we run the world and we need to organize the world in order to have enough to eat, in order to have shelter, in order to have healthcare, in order to have all the things that human beings need, that we don’t have to work so hard.

Work will become a choice. Work will become something that we do because we love being engaged and we love having projects, and I don’t think we’re going to get tired of this. I’m not so worried about what we’re going to do with our time when we don’t have to spend 50, 60 hours a week at a job and give it all our focus, and all our energy, and all our attention, and all our emotional involvement.

The opportunity is to work drastically less, and leave aside what consequences it has for our economic situation. You want to work less with the same pay: you’re still producing the same value. You want to work less because you want a better balance. You are not alive to work. You don’t live to work.

Work is meant to be a basis. It’s meant to provide you with the things that you need in your life. This enormous technological shift is another opportunity. It’s another opportunity, which we shouldn’t squander. We shouldn’t miss it, and the danger is that we will miss it. My fear, I’m very optimistic, but I fear that we will miss it. And the reason I have this fear is that we’ve just missed it in the past twice, three times maybe, if you count the internet as something separate. We had the opportunity and we’ve let it go.

Our mindset, our frame, our paradigm is that working all the time is what we need to do. We are so driven by that paradigm that we can’t imagine a world where we just take it easy, where outsourcing to the software, to the machine, to the robot is basically our future.

It’s a question of imagination. It’s a question of shifting gears. It’s a question of seeing this opportunity for what it is and grabbing it, and exploring it, and going for it, because it will liberate us. It will liberate us from this weird shadow that we have to be busy all the time just to be worth something. The shadow of organized work, which takes up all our time. We don’t need to do that. We haven’t needed to do that for a while, but now we have another reminder. We have another shock to the system that can make us do things differently, that can liberate us from this work ethic, from this work madness, from this work obsession, from this work illusion, this work myth. That’s the opportunity. Let’s grab it.