JPMorgan CEO says our children will only work 3.5 days a week thanks to AI
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I rent a very basic one bedroom in an awful location which costs more than half my after tax salary, and a round trip to my office in Toronto takes 3 hours and $45 of public transit. The price of this unit has also increased by more than my salary every year for the past 3 years.
Here's hoping I get to be one of those people who can relocate from Toronto next.
Keeping up with the joneses is a big driver of long work weeks. Globalization also drives it. Scale drives it. Boredom drives it. It's complicated.
The takeaway message is: yes, the capital class are and have always been the main drivers of longer hours.
But you're good to highlight that there's some useful high tech out there on the fields.
On some spreadsheet they are working 3.5 days. Across the entire population. If that actually happens to real American children across the board in corporate America, I will be impressed and proclaim the opposite of everything I say. What I think will actually happen is what you are saying. Fire some manual labor that today is still actually needed and getting paid. Many if not most of those are already not American workers but temporary or outright illegal foreign workers anyway. Not all of it being because "rich people are bad" but also because "poor people are not poor enough" (so to speak - I know this is "political suicide"). What our 1950s ancestors called hard but fair and honorable sweat labor is unthinkable to many of us today and we gladly let it be done by said half illegal labor and we turn the other way and binge watch another Netflix show while complaining that we can't find any good jobs!
You and I exist as citizens of our respective nations. We have wants and needs, and we engage with politics (hopefully by voting) to pursue those wants and needs.
So long as we are part of the majority, it is likely our wants and needs will be more or less met.
When we are no longer in the majority, our needs and wants are less likely to be met.
When politicians import (or allow to be imported) a new demographic into the voter base, who bring with them new collections of wants and needs, that activity harms our bargaining position as politicians are no longer beholden to our interests.
In America, in an era where special treatment and incentives and punishments are being awarded on the basis of ethnicity(which cannot be changed or altered), this maters even more.
We exist in a zero-sum system of relative power.
Do you have a source for this?
Is immigration actually meaningfully impacting party demographics?
Yes. I will edit in a few examples from several countries in a moment.
It's worth noting, however, that interest displacement/dilution is still an issue even if it doesn't force/induce party clustering. Individual parties shifting policy priorities/implementations/strategies to cater to new voter bases to win power results in a relative deprioritization of citizens.
The fundamental dynamics at play still apply.
If the largest demo in a nation only occupied, say, 40% of it's voter base, a coalition of the other demos can override them and (if the competition is polarized enough) will eventually realize the dominant strategy is to actively reduce that groups numbers and power to secure the position of the coalition and the individual power of each of it's members.
Its entry level conflict theory in practice.
Edit: Sources.
Overall trends in party affiliation(USA): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/26/what-the-...
Immigration trends in party loyalty (USA): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
Trends in immigration settlement patterns: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findi...
Trends in voting patterns by settlement region: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-...
The takeaway here is that immigration flows to areas with shared want/need profiles and elevate the national power of those demand slates, displacing power from alternative slates. Whether this good or not depends on if the demands of immigrants overlap with your own demands. If they do, you are empowered. If they do not, you are disempowered.
I will add them shortly.
Maybe they don't want to be?
The conspiracy elements of it are entirely unnecessary.
Every productivity gain is only meant to make workers faster which earns profits faster for the executives and shareholders.
With the prospect of faster work, execs and shareholders are salivating at the thought of grinding workers more in the same 40 hours/week but earn more profits for the same amount of hours.
If we want our children to live a better life than us, we need massive changes in laws (healthcare, exempt workers etc.).
JPMorgan's billionaire CEO does not speak for the many decamillionaire CEOs who want to get into the billionaire club.
That's how we got the work week down to 40 hours.
There's a bill in California to decrease it down to 32 hours.
We could already be at 28 hours if we voted for it, theoretically.
I've also heard that increased productivity is eventually captured by the financial sector through increased debt servicing costs as it extends more credit to match the increased productivity. That one I'm prepared to believe.
Whatever the case, I highly doubt we'll see increased productivity resulting in more leisure time without a political revolution.
Women went from carrying washboards to the rivers edge to walking downstairs and dropping a load into the washing machine. Root cellars became ice boxes became refrigerators. Instead of beating the rugs you run a vacuum, etc.
Women could've hung out at home with this newfound time, but instead they mostly went into the workplace. This roughly doubled the labor force and over time essentially halved wages workers took home, making dual income households the norm and now essentially a requirement to own property.
First, it didn't happen then, specially if wages being halved meaning that there isn't even a theoretical possibility of working half the hours for the same pay.
And why does doubling labour force halve wages? Land is limited so the higher competition can mean more workers mean higher prices, sure. But for everything else, productivity of workers per hour increased. This isn't the middle ages where demand for labour is more or less limited by the availability of agricultural land. Why can't the new and old workers capture the same share of the pie they produce as before women joined the wage labour force?
> ... for the first time since his creation 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.
> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
> ... We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.
"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", Keynes, 1930
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Didn't exactly end up that way.
However I would note actually many people have chosen to do exactly this and our abundance sustains them sufficiently. But the enshitification of literally reality itself makes it impossible for most people to see beyond the human hamster wheels we’ve built for ourselves.
And they'll work the remaining 3.5 days no thanks to AI at all.