Early this year, Microsoft co-founder and its first CEO, Bill Gates was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Gate, who was the 7th richest billionaire in the world last year, had recently published a memoir called Source Code, so a large portion of the interview was talking about his life.
About three-quarters of the way through the interview, he starts talking about AI, and at one point made a passing comment regarding the possibility of AI reducing people’s workweek to just 2 or 3 days.
You know, what will jobs be like? Should we, you know, just work, like, 2 or 3 days a week?
I think a 2-day work week would be amazing.
But if there is one thing I have learned after nearly 40 years being in the workforce, it is that business owners want to pay you for the labour you perform, not the product of that labour.
When business owners implement technology, it is not to make workers’ work life easier, it is to pay workers less. They do it in two ways: reducing hours or giving each worker more labour.
Reducing hours, in the eyes of business owners, means fewer hours to pay for.
Giving each worker more labour means having to hire fewer workers.
Either way, workers lose out when business owners implement technology.
A 2020 study out of MIT, for example, found that for every industrial robot implemented in the workplace per 1,000 workers in the United States, wages decline by 0.42% and the employment-to-population ratio drops by 0.2 percentage points.
So 10 robots would mean a 4.2% wage decline and a 2% drop in the employment-to-population ratio. That increases to 42% wage decrease and a 20% lower employment-to-population ratio with 100 robots.
If we move to a 2-day workweek, workers who produce the same output through technology use as they would in 5 days without it, they must be paid the same as they would be without the technology.
Either that or there must be some other mechanism, such as a universal basic income to top up income.
Otherwise, it will just be another way for the owning class to exploit the working class, which is already dealing with precarious material conditions.
