I’d like to work four days a week instead of five. Wouldn’t you?
I’d take Fridays off. The way I imagine it, it’d be just a few years from now. A robot in a butler’s uniform would serve us drinks in the backyard on what used to be just another workday. I’d toss a ball around with the kids while ChatGPT did their homework for them.
Who says the world is going to hell and the future is bleak? Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and job automation hold out the hope of less work, more leisure and long weekends every weekend.
That’s the view, anyway, of Christopher Pissarides, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics and said this month that thanks to AI and automation, society “could move to a four-day week easily.”
But I’m skeptical that it’ll happen easily.
I realize it’s presumptuous of me to question the optimism of a Nobel Prize winner. But, with all due respect, count me among those who wonder whether the financial benefits of automation will really be put to use improving workers’ well-being – or whether they’ll just feed higher profits for shareholders and heftier bonuses for executives, exacerbating income inequality.
Fear of losing jobs to machines goes back at least to the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution. Many of us learned in school about the Luddites, a secret organization of disaffected early 19th century English mill workers who went around destroying automated looms and other newfangled machinery they feared would eliminate jobs or worsen labor conditions.
These days automation is moving faster than ever. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute determined that up to half the jobs people do in the world could theoretically be automated.
Already, salespeople are disappearing at my local Rite-Aid because of self-service checkout machines. Parking garage attendants can hardly be found. At airports, boarding passes are dispensed by machines.
And do we think those workers are all off enjoying three-day weekends?
With the extraordinary innovations in AI, automation may soon move beyond blue-collar work, increasingly affecting so-called “knowledge workers” with college educations. Who’s at risk? Think software engineers, tax preparers, copy editors and paralegals. For starters.
Many economists note that, historically, when automation has eliminated jobs, new ones offset the losses. One Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that more than 60% of jobs in the U.S. in 2018 hadn’t been invented in 1940.
Furthermore, robots can do jobs that are undesirable or highly dangerous or require superhuman strength and stamina. So there are definitely benefits to automation. The challenge is to ensure they’re spread around.
To mitigate enormous disruption, the transition cannot be left entirely to the caprice of employers. Pissarides urges the government to provide income and job-transition support to workers.
Too often in history, society has left workers to fend for themselves in times of dramatic economic change. Is government committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again?
Like everyone else, I’m eager for my four-day workweek. But I don’t kid myself that it’ll happen on its own thanks to the generosity of the modern-day mill owners. It’ll take a fight.
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