Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where ‘machines can make all the food and stuff’ isn’t a bad idea::“A society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK,” Bill Gates said.
I don’t care what one of the richest people in the world thinks about labour and work/life balance. I care what the average person thinks.
But he’s right about this.
Until enough of us say that we don’t care what they think, and we demand better.
And their decisions equate to: how can we employ the fewest number of people with the least benefits and make the most profit off what we’re selling?
But definitely don’t consider that under- or unemployed people don’t have the money to spend on making those profits happen.
Bill Gates isn’t making the decisions anymore and hasn’t been for decades now
How fuckin high are you to forget how much power comes from being a billionaire?
Yeah, every debate about reducing the number of cars always ends at something like “too many jobs are involved in the car industry, so we need to preserve these jobs, and also people need cars to go work in these factories”. I feel like there will hardly be a deep environmental breakthrough if it doesn’t come with a deep social change.
Companies would automate and save on employees, making people poor. Automation only makes sense if basic universal income is applied
The “””end goal””” would be people working half the time, earning half the money, and stuff costing half as much to make and half as much to purchase.
The issue is we have to force them to translate the manufacturing cost decrease in a price decrease, or it’s never going to happen.
A reduction in work hours is also a step forward until UBI is instated. If I make the same amount doing 4 or even 3 days of work in a week, while automation does the rest, that works for me. The idea is that people need to work less and make the same if not more. UBI or a reduction in work hours are both good paths forward. UBI being the ultimate goal.
If people are that poor they will just deautomate the machines in protest until UBI happens.
I don’t care what he thinks, but I care that he has a platform that others in his class listen to and may respect. It’s not a position you hear often from those with a lot of wealth. I’m ok with progress coming from any direction, even if it’s self-serving in some form, and I do think it’s self-serving.
I remember him saying that computers would make people work less by being more productive, but in the end the difference was pocketed by the rich. I don’t think it’s just a technology problem…
It has never been a technology problem.
If society was build correct in a democracy, advances in all fields would always be for benefitting the people and the majority.
This has been a problem ever since the industrial revolution and what caused the great depression.
If technology advances to a stage where we only need 75% of the current work force, the answer is not to fire 25%. It is for everyone to benefit and work 25% less or get 25% more pay. (or 12,5% work less and 12,5% more pay. Our choice)
That is a working democracy.
You should get 33% more pay as the full work force productivity would be 4/3 of the original in your example.
This difference might be clearer with an example where only half of the work force is required to match the original productivity. In this case, if the full work force continues to work, productivity is presumably doubled. That’s not a 50% increase. It’s 200% of the original or a 100% increase. So the trade-off should be between 50% fewer working hours and 100% more pay.
Of course, instead you’ll work the same hours for the same pay and some shareholders pocket that 100% difference.
I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.
So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work
It’s all about power. The 1% will not give up their power ( = the opportunity to do whatever they want whenever they want) just because it would be good for the 99% to work less.
That’s not how the world works.
The 1% will continue to make sure that they are in control of whatever the next thing is that grant them the same or more power.
If owning AI gives them power they will do whatever necessary to own AI and let’s not kid ourselves here “they” would be you and me if we had the chance.
It took me way too long to realize that a lot of people think like you do and then project it onto the rest of us.
No. If I’m being honest, I would pass at the chance to have power. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’d do the right thing with it. I have a small handful of people who have suffered at my hands throughout my life and I have a hard enough time sleeping over that.
To know that I was making the quality of life worse for people who I’d never even know for my own sake would break me. I’d deserve it too.
Unfortunately, the people who I’ve know that exercise power over their fellow man don’t seem to lose a wink of sleep. They justify everything, but they’re miserable and they don’t have any real friends. They’re constantly paranoid that people are out to take something from them because they are. Some people try to reach the pockets above the foot on their back to take what they can from the situation. I can’t relate to them either, but I can at least empathize with them.
We need a branch of government filled with random people. Politicians are people who seek power, the type of person that wins big elections is not a normal person, thus, normal people are not represented in government.
In the US, I wish the house were filled with random people. Randomly select 3 people for each house seat, have the 3 people debate and explain their personal beliefs, and then people vote. This would fill the seat with someone who is mostly likeable, but is still a normal person and not a career politician.
It’s not a bad idea, but it also can’t exist without a complete re-haul of what it means to live in modern society. Right now, replacing workers and cutting hours means people don’t have enough money to live. That is not an acceptable result of automation. I’m not qualified enough to have a reasonable solution to this, but I know it needs to be addressed before we get to that point.
Isn’t this the primary argument for universal basic income? If you’re keeping unnecessary jobs around just to give people something to do, you’re not actually keeping them for contributions to society… In the long run ubi could probably even be cheaper than paying to prop up obsolete and wholly unnecessary industries.
While true, UBI would have to be funded by corporate tax.
“We no longer need people to be able to sell and deliver our products”
^ Win for the corporations
“Virtually no (low-income) property is unoccupied now. And my middle class tenants are making more from UBI, so I raised rent”
^ Win for landlords (which are mostly corporations)
“We can now demographically target ads to UBI payouts to get people to spend their money”
^ Win for corporations
It continues, but the general idea is that, while the populace could benefit from UBI, if it just comes from their taxes it’s not going to shrink class division in any way, but increase it
Yes, funding UBI with raised corporate taxes is absolutely not optional, I agree completely.
At the end of the day, simplified, UBI means: massive cuts to the workforce, in lieu of technology that can perform the exact same tasks more efficiently, for less; all the while paying people money at the same or similar levels of what they earned before.
It would be insane to assume the former would just grow wealthier over night while the latter is relegated to being financed by - in this example - wishful thinking. The money’s gotta come from somewhere, and it makes sense it be the same place it’s (supposed to be) coming from now.
If everyone gets UBI, I assume it is still optional to work. Otherwise no one would produce goods and services that we consume in order to live. Or at least fixing the robots.
I assume the incentive for that is additional income.
Wouldn’t this then create an even larger gap in income inequality? And further dilute the spending power of those who are only able to collect UBI?
It would, yes. But, the argument is that a person who wants a higher quality of life than “simply living” would be expected to work.
The right to life is, this way, protected - the right to a quality life, similar to today, would still have to be earned. This is in addition to the social pressure to work.
Look at this guy who doesn’t have billions he made from the 90s and 2000s to rely on!
The machine doesn’t require a salary but instead of sending the money it saves to the workers it replaces it is added to the yearly profits, a three day work week with more automatisation can’t happen before that last part is reversed or there’s extreme deflation happening to compensate for lower wages.
Yeah no shit. The problem is that capitalism hates it.
The Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Denmark are all capitalist societies and run on <5 day work weeks. Capitalism is not the problem, North American society in particular is what seems to have the problem.
We will absolutely have automation but the workers will just be fired and all profits will be absorbed by the stockholder.
No cost savings will be passed on the other consumer either.
The problem is that would be wildly unstable. The capitalist class can’t sell automated-produced goods if people don’t have any money because they’re unemployed.
However, those mass layoffs will make this quarter’s numbers go up, and everything else is a problem for next quarter, which is why they’ll do it.
Once AI and robots can do/make anything they want on demand, they won’t even need money, so don’t need to make money by selling stuff. For sure, they will probably have a tough time transitioning from the idea of making money, but they won’t need to any more. The rest of us could split off our own fairer economy, but they’ll probably have the IP locked up on all the technology so we can’t use it and have to keep working 5 day or more weeks.
