Jack Ma Says 12-Hour Work Week Could Be the Norm | Hacker News Reader

Jack Ma Says 12-Hour Work Week Could Be the Norm

bloomberg.com

37 pointsun_montagnard47 comments

At the risk of being downvoted - I have stopped paying attention to Jack Ma. He only knows to to talk.

Edit - Since someone’s asking for an explanation as to why I stopped patting attention to Mr Ma ...

I have seen 2-3 videos where he sounds really inspirational. Like one where he breaks down a persons career timeline and what he would be doing at particular age groups. (Probably the most viral video of him)

Second video where he speaks on how we humans can stay relevant in age of AI (By changing education in his words, teaching children to paint, play sports et al which we already do anyways).

The second video was where I started doubting if he’s a clueless person and just goes around fooling people.

Final nail in the coffin was his video with Elon Musk. I couldn’t believe for a minute when Mr Ma says he has just returned from Mars. After that he said AI should be named Alibaba Intelligence (If he had only cracked open a book and read about the Dartmouth conference). And then the icing on the cake, the answer to AI is love.

I won’t deny that love may be answer to AI, but Jack was just mincing words to make another inspirational video.

Someone needs to post the video of him and elon musk here for those who haven’t seen it.

https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU

https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw (just the cringe)

I didn't really care for what Jack Ma had to say before seeing this video. After seeing it, I feel like he should be actively avoided as a source of wisdom.

In addition to him not knowing anything, he could at least start reducing hours for his workers at Alibaba:

> "At least 40 companies, including Huawei and Alibaba Group, have implemented the 996 schedule or an even more intensive alternative."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

I downvoted you because that's not really a valuable contribution, just a random opinion with no backing - you should add some reasoning for it.

You should explain why, and perhaps you wouldn't get downvoted.

You don't need to pay attention to him. But trust me there is a reason why he is one of the richest people in the world. It is not luck. Business in China is incredibly cutthroat.

Doesn't that still mean Jack Ma can't say anything interesting? What value is his perspective if he can't ever be trusted to share it?

Not sure about that... Business in China is controlled by the government. It's entirely plausibly to install an airhead frontman to appease YouTube and Western audiences.

Jack Ma is a good businessman, but he can be as vacuous as any of us on stuff he had no idea about.

Yep, he is just saying, and not a particular good commentary per say.

I agree with almost everything you say. A few points of contention- most are from what I perceive to be a lack of cultural context.

In the Musk video, when he says he's returned from Mars, that was a self depreciating joke on the account of his facial features, which the Chinese media had called him a Martian in the past. He has sorta just owned it since.

Everything else is spot on.

I read this as 12 hour workday and got irate. That’s the tune he usually sings...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90335059/alibaba-founder-jack-ma...

Pretty much what Alibaba is practicing in China.

Yeah, I was about to go on about how that is the worst part of East Asian culture and then realized it said "week".

Here's a 5 minute summary of the conversation between Elon Musk and Jack Ma. https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw

Honestly I just see Elon being trolled in that video. It’s easy to see it the other way around if you come from a different frame of reference. But from my frame of referenance the idea of commercializing Mars, AI revolting against humans, are ludicrous ideas.

AI can be bad, but only through abuse by humans and not by the plot of Terminator. Mars is great but I feel like we have more pressing issue to solve. Being rich and privileged can blind us to the pressing needs and focus on overly lofty ambitions.

Yeah but... come on.

I would take colonizing Mars (with 12 hour work days) over wage slaving 12 hours a day.

Instead what we get are some people working 140 hours for 40 hours pay while millions are completely pushed out of the economy. These kind of benefits will not happen automatically it's going to take serious class warfare and real revolution and bloodshed to get there .

Came here to say this. What fantasy world are these guys living in? Most people I know barely get weekends to themselves, what with work being pushed passive aggressively through WhatsApp. And no, it is not a choice. For every person who decides to Eat, Pray, Love, there is a hungry guy waiting to work 10 hours a week more to get that job. It is brutal out there.

The benefits not happening automatically doesn't mean bloodshed is the solution. I like to think that we could solve the problem with intelligence and design. I forsee that some nation will come up with a better system that does not require everyone to be consuming and employed. Maybe a UBI? Maybe some universal dividend on capital? The savings from having only the best workers employed, combined with the fruits of leisure, will propel that nation ahead and others will struggle to catch on with it.

More likely they will be destabilized/invaded/boycotted/cherry-picked/psyopsed/bombed-into-freedom or beat into submission in any other way.

+embargoed.

Soft power is crucial to prevent that, that's why the surpluses of such system should be directed to arts and technology.

If this ever happens, the reality will be closer to having companies keeping 30% of the people to work 40 hours and just not bothering to hire the other 70%.

This is what will happen. one person will learn 2 skills, get a small increase and work a normal week, while person 2 get downsized.

Oligarchs crystal ball gazing about future money making opportunities for minions after they have automated most job roles out of existence.

Automating whatever could be automated without loss of quality is the right thing to do.

Making sure everybody have high living standards (as supported by above automation) is a job of democratic governments

As long as we have housing and health as limited resources people will just use time to work harder to obtain those resources.

> The economic problem may be solved...man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well...three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

— John Maynard Keynes in 1930.

Still waiting for this to be true before buying into the 12-hour work week theory.

This guy ask employee to work 996 and defended that practice openly.

And frankly, he is about clueless as most citizens on AI (as demonstrated in his awkward interchange with Leon recently), there isn't much of weight of such statement...

Jut image what father /mother you could be: leave work at 9 and come back at 9, exhausted. 6 days a week. Time with your kids? I guess one could it for a year or months at certain periods of their life but as norm?

Possible indeed, Keynes pointed that out a couple generations ago. And as always it depends solely on whether society is run such that people benefit from or compete with technology.

Wouldn’t be surprised if this guy ended up being a puppet for some larger entity this entire time ala Epstein.

I’ve wondered about that myself. Ma’s background, the things he says in public, his weird movie, and so on, don’t match the concept of a ruthless businessman. He could well be the friendly face of a cabal of PLA generals or something.

Where, by the subjunctive mood verb “could”, they mean “never will be”?

Just conditional mood rather than subjunctive I think.

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/grammar_moods.html

The Ma/Musk AI debate in China showed two very different societal approaches to how to handle the impact of AI.

Ma’s approach is: everybody work less and enjoy the perks.

Musk’s is: learn AI or perish, and beware the consequences.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, although the messages are different. I believe this because Musk’s assertion of an elite few living in tall spires and the masses living in relative poverty was overtly dismissed by Ma, but I felt that his facial expressions suggested that he was hiding his agreement of it.

Musk describe what will really happen though. The employer will always hire as few as possible, unless it’s some relative of a director. It’s too early but I think in the long term UBI is pretty much the only solution.

>I think in the long term UBI is pretty much the only solution.

Or...the costs of goods adjust as demand shifts, and things previously not considered "a job" start being considered jobs. I don't know why people get this idea in their head that if suddenly everyone works less for the same amount, everything stays the same price. Producers still want consumers, so prices shift. In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes. As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

> In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes.

Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics, +/- better measurement technology in the case of food. Emotion isn't magic, there are whole industries that already know how to design things to be "moving and emotional".

> As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

The issue isn't "an economy", but an economy where most population can find gainful employment during their entire working age. This is increasingly becoming less likely in the future, and we need to find a way to deal with that.

(Also, the prices are flexible, but if they shift too high or too low, producers start doing problematic things or give up on the product entirely. This is how you end up with farmers letting tons of perfectly good food to rot, while 10 minutes down the road there's a city full of starving people.)

>Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics

You're missing my point: things that don't seem like jobs, no matter what they are, will be legitimate gainful jobs, as long as people want them done and they can't be automated or are too much effort to automate. Unless you are making the argument that in the near/medium future, nothing falls into that category. If that's the case, then we just disagree. I think the problem lies more with connecting people to those new jobs than them actually existing.

There's a lot of things people want done that can't be jobs. For instance, myself and quite a lot of other people want the surplus CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Yet this isn't a job, and probably won't be for a while, because we can't make money off it. I can't afford just paying for it, not the amounts required. I'd have to make money off it or off something else.

Outside of charity, no job exists without it making more money for the employer than it costs to pay for that job.

I'm making the argument that the pool of things that people want done and can monetize is much smaller, and I'm not convinced it'll grow fast enough to cover for automation-induced job loss.

Everything you said is wrong.

1: Ma said that AI can never be as smart as a human. The core of his argument was that humans will always be more clever than machines because humans create machines. Humans working less is just a byproduct of this. I was amazed to see how stupid Ma is. He is truly ignorant.

2: the core of Elon’s argument is that AGI is detrimental to human society. Elon’s first choice is to not have AGIs come about. Merging with them is his second choice and a stopgap measure. It isn’t learn ai or perish, it’s learn ai and reduce the probability of perishing modestly. You may not realize this without having heard other interviews though.

3: musk never said anything about people living in spires as a societal inequality thing. He said in terms of being able to see what’s coming, some people are atop spires and some people are on the ground. All he’s saying is that some people can see clearly what’s coming (AI turning the world upside down) and most people can’t see what’s coming. Nothing to do with socioeconomics or inequality. Wasn’t a social comment.

Watch Jack speak to Alibaba's original employees and you'll find that most of his musings about technology were off the mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up9-C4_8dVo

And yet Alibaba is now worth more than Ebay and Yahoo combined.

He may be ignorant but he's not entirely stupid.

Of course, the irony of him talking about how Alibaba employees should work more hours shouldn't be lost on people.

I was referring to their messages to the public about how to react to advances in AI. Your interpretations are about AI’s impact on society. I don’t disagree with your interpretations, but it definitely doesn’t make mine wrong. They’re different facets of the same conversation.

I don’t follow you. I have accurately described what they actually said in the China video. Your descriptions were wrong. It has nothing to do with my point of view. Go review the video.

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