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The notion that artificial intelligence will usher in a future in which we only work three days a week might sound to many like a utopian dream. But some investors are betting good money on it. Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood talent agent and sports tycoon, said last week he had raised almost $3bn from investors for a new events venture in a bet that AI would reduce the length of the work week and give people more free time to go to see live sports and music. The idea that AI will lead to an explosion of leisure time was also cited as part of the rationale for last month’s $55bn takeover of video games company Electronic Arts by a Saudi-backed consortium.
Is this a good bet? The idea that technological progress can enable people to work fewer hours is not outlandish. Beginning in the 19th century, working hours in many industrial countries gradually reduced as economies grew richer. Indeed, this increase in leisure was “counted as one of the great blessings of technology”, according to historian Benjamin Hunnicutt in his book Free Time. The typical worker in the UK today, for example, works about half the number of hours per week their counterparts in the mid-19th century did.
But in order to believe a similar trend is going to take hold again, you have to assume three things. First: that AI will deliver a substantial boost to economic productivity. For now, that is highly uncertain. While some professionals such as computer programmers report vast productivity savings in their own jobs, there is little evidence yet of substantial gains at the macroeconomic level. Indeed, some experts believe the rush to adopt generative AI has had a deleterious effect on productivity in white-collar roles. A recent Harvard Business Review article coined the term “workslop” to describe a proliferation of “low effort, unhelpful AI-generated work” which simply “shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work”.
That said, it may take time for companies to make best use of the new technology. The productivity gains from the invention of electricity and the computer took decades to appear. And while the impact of generative AI on office jobs grabs the majority of our attention, autonomous robots may have bigger effects in workplaces most people don’t see, such as mines and warehouses.
Second, you have to assume the economic gains will be widely distributed. This, too, is uncertain. Although rising productivity has historically lifted average living standards over the long run, there have been times and places where they have diverged for decades-long stretches, such as at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Now, as then, much will depend on the individual or collective power of workers to claim a share of the proceeds.
Third, you have to believe workers will “cash in” those proceeds in the form of extra leisure, rather than higher income. But will they? In many developed countries, there has been a slowdown in the reduction in working hours in recent decades. Hunnicutt’s book is subtitled “The Forgotten American Dream” because US workers seem to have abandoned the pursuit of shorter working hours since the 1970s. In spite of rising productivity, average weekly working hours in the US have stagnated ever since.
Far from trading income for leisure, it is the people with the highest salaries who tend to work the longest hours. Indeed, Americans are so diligent that more than 40 per cent of those who receive paid time off from their employers don’t even take their full allowance (often meagre by European standards), according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Why is that? Some economists believe there is simply no limit to our material wants nor our desire to “keep up with the Joneses”. Corporate expectations and fear of job loss play a role too.
But that doesn’t mean a different distribution of work and leisure is impossible. As I wrote recently, the Netherlands has already moved quietly towards a four-day week with the shortest working hours in the EU. Much depends on business and culture.
Is AI going to usher in an age of leisure? It is not an economically illiterate dream, but unlike Ari Emanuel, I wouldn’t bet on it. And even if it does happen in some economies, the US is probably the last place I would expect to see it. That said, there might be some consolation for the investors of these big sums. An alternative dystopian outcome, in which a sliver of people become extremely rich, and everyone else subsists on a basic income from the government, might also be consistent with a boom in expensive live events for the few, and computer games for the masses.