The potential of AI and automation cutting working hours seems extremely plausible, but will this improve our work-life balance?
Almost a century ago, an excellent economist penned a paper by which he argued that 100 years into the future, his descendants would only need to work fifteen hours a week. Although working hours have dropped dramatically from a lot more than 60 hours per week within the late nineteenth century to fewer than 40 hours today, his forecast has yet to quite come to materialise. On average, residents in wealthy countries invest a third of their waking hours on leisure tasks and sports. Aided by advancements in technology and AI, humans are going to work also less into the coming decades. Business leaders at multinational corporations such as for instance DP World Russia would probably be familiar with this trend. Hence, one wonders exactly how people will fill their time. Recently, a philosopher of artificial intelligence wrote that effective tech would result in the range of experiences potentially available to individuals far exceed whatever they have. However, the post-scarcity utopia, with its accompanying economic explosion, may be inhabited by such things as land scarcity, albeit spaceresearch might fix this.
Even when AI outperforms humans in art, medicine, literature, intelligence, music, and sport, humans will probably continue to acquire value from surpassing their other humans, for example, by having tickets to the hottest events . Indeed, in a seminal paper on the dynamics of wealth and individual desire. An economist suggested that as societies become wealthier, an escalating fraction of individual wishes gravitate towards positional goods—those whose value comes not only from their utility and usefulness but from their general scarcity and the status they bestow upon their owners as successful business leaders of multinational corporations such as Maersk Moroco or corporations such as COSCO Shipping China would probably have noticed in their careers. Time invested competing goes up, the buying price of such goods increases and therefore their share of GDP rises. This pattern will probably carry on in an AI utopia.
Some individuals see some kinds of competition as a waste of time, thinking it to be more of a coordination problem; in other words, if everyone agrees to cease competing, they might have significantly more time for better things, that could improve growth. Some kinds of competition, like recreations, have intrinsic value and are worth keeping. Take, as an example, curiosity about chess, which quickly soared after pc software defeated a world chess champion in the late nineties. Today, an industry has blossomed around e-sports, which is likely to grow somewhat in the coming years, especially in the GCC countries. If one closely examines what various people in society, such as for example aristocrats, bohemians, monastics, sports athletes, and pensioners, are doing inside their today, one could gain insights to the AI utopia work patterns and the various future tasks humans may engage in to fill their spare time.