The notion that artificial intelligence will usher in a future in which we only work three days a week might sound to many like a utopian dream. But some investors are betting good money on it. Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood talent agent and sports tycoon, said last week he had raised almost $3bn from investors for a new events venture in a bet that AI would reduce the length of the work week and give people more free time to go to see live sports and music. The idea that AI will lead to an explosion of leisure time was also cited as part of the rationale for last month’s $55bn takeover of video games company Electronic Arts by a Saudi-backed consortium.
Is this a good bet? The idea that technological progress can enable people to work fewer hours is not outlandish. Beginning in the 19th century, working hours in many industrial countries gradually reduced as economies grew richer. Indeed, this increase in leisure was “counted as one of the great blessings of technology”, according to historian Benjamin Hunnicutt in his book Free Time. The typical worker in the UK today, for example, works about half the number of hours per week their counterparts in the mid-19th century did.
But in order to believe a similar trend is going to take hold again, you have to assume three things. First: that AI will deliver a substantial boost to economic productivity. For now, that is highly uncertain. While some professionals such as computer programmers report vast productivity savings in their own jobs, there is little evidence yet of substantial gains at the macroeconomic level. Indeed, some experts believe the rush to adopt generative AI has had a deleterious effect on productivity in white-collar roles. A recent Harvard Business Review article coined the term “workslop” to describe a proliferation of “low effort, unhelpful AI-generated work” which simply “shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work”.