When I was in graduate school, a couple of Indian fellow students were doing research on artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks. I have lost track of their names, but I won’t be surprised if they are now comfortably resting on multiples of millions of dollars.
Despite their multimillionaire status, chances are also that they are not resting but are hard at work. You and I would think that people might call it a career if they have acquired a couple of millions. But, leisure in prosperity means that there is much higher opportunity cost in terms of income that is not earned as a result of doing nothing. The more the income, the more the opportunity cost of sitting around, and very few call it quits. Apparently it is difficult to walk away from gazillions. So, the rich work themselves to death?
Those grad students and many others contributed to the development of AI that is all over the news these days. Quite a few thinkers, including Ezra Klein, are freaking out about AI. Among the many issues that Klein lists in his column, the one that I want to focus on is the same one that I have blogged about quite a bit over the couple of decades that I have been blogging: “Could A.I. put millions out of work?”
Think about the information technology (IT) revolution that we have lived through these past few decades. And think back about the industrial revolution. Would you think that there are tens of millions of people struggling to find employment as a result of these? In case you missed the news, the latest unemployment rate in the US is 3.6 percent. A remarkably low number.
Perhaps you are thinking that AI will be different. The increase in productivity will make many of us less employed because we will have to work less than before. Will it?
Even before thinking about how AI could affect our working hours, consider what John Maynard Keynes—yes, the Keynes after whom we have the word “Keynesian” in policy-making—said almost a hundred years ago. Keynes predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would work for a mere 15 hours each week because that is all that would be needed to be freed from economic necessity.
I blogged about this in 2019, with the following quote and graph:
If we wanted to produce as much as Keynes’s countrymen did in the 1930s, we wouldn’t need everyone to work even 15 hours per week. If you adjust for increases in labour productivity, it could be done in seven or eight hours, 10 in Japan (see graph below). These increases in productivity come from a century of automation and technological advances: allowing us to produce more stuff with less labour. In this sense, modern developed countries have way overshot Keynes prediction – we need to work only half the hours he predicted to match his lifestyle.
We do not work for only ten hours a week now, do we?
For one thing, our consumption has increased. Has increased a lot. So, yes, to live like how one lived in 1930, ten hours of work per week would be enough. But, are we content with living a 1930s life?
Globally, people enjoy a standard of living much higher than in 1930 (and nowhere is this more true than in the Western countries that Keynes wrote about). We would not be content with a good life by our grandparents’ standards.
We would not be content.
We are a strange species. We bring all the trouble of work on ourselves and then dream about not having to work. We chain ourselves to work, put a lock on it and throw the key away, and then dream of being free for at least two days of the week.
History has shown us that gains in efficiency or productivity as a result of new technologies rarely liberate those already overburdened in society. Instead, new tech often creates new expectations and norms, heightening standards and the amount of work required to attain them.
Consider, for example, how people’s work hours have shifted as a result of the IT revolution. First it was emails, which pressured employees to read and reply to them late in the night, early in the morning, and over the weekend. The smartphone worsened this 24x7 work expectation. Has IT reduced the work hours in your recent memory? All it has done is shift the goal post and made workers work longer hours.
If that has been our recent experience, which is ongoing for those who are working—may I remind you that I am retired!—then why should AI be any different? Why would AI unleash a productivity revolution that would let people work only 15 hours a week, with the rest of the time for leisure?
Simply put, the AI productivity narrative is a lie. It holds that by automating tasks, AI will make them more efficient and make us, in turn, more productive. This will free us for more meaningful tasks or for leisurely pursuits such as yoga, painting, or volunteerism, promoting human flourishing and well-being. But if history is any guide, this outcome is highly unlikely, save for a privileged elite. More likely, the rich will only get richer.
Because it’s not technology that can liberate us. To preserve and promote meaningful autonomy in the face of these AI advancements, we must look to our social, political, and economic systems and policies. As Derek Thompson observes in The Atlantic, “Technology only frees people from work if the boss—or the government, or the economic system—allows it.”
You think that the overlords who own the robots will be happy that their underlings work only 15 hours a week? A tiny tax on the money that they will earn could easily allow an overwhelming majority to live decent lives while not even working; think of an universal basic income (UBI.) But, that calls for the owners of the means of production (gasp!) to share with the rest.
AI is not a problem nor a solution, as long as there is no change in human nature that is to be nasty, brutish, and short.
Some of the most free people that I have met in my life were in the villages like Pattamadai and Sengottai. Seemingly in sync with the hot temperature conditions, where even a brisk walk can tire a person, there was a whole lot of doing nothing. We folks from urban and industrial areas, having been used to working in order to earn the privilege of sitting around twice a week, found that kind of a rustic life to be dull and boring and even labeled them as lazy for not doing anything.
What can/should be done? As I have often argued (in the previous version of my blog), politicians need to make it a priority to rework the social contract and strengthen the social safety net. As simple as that. But, that is an impossible political problem that no AI can solve.