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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Mass automation won't happen in our lifetimes. Robots will push out humans in some areas and raise the overall standard of living through productivity increases, but the Industrial Revolution proved that even an unprecedentedly massive increase in output will be matched by a corresponding increase in desires. Keynes thought we'd all be working 5-15 hour weeks at most by the 70s yet that was obviously wrong. Something like 98% of people were employed in agriculture in the 1700s which has dropped down to <2% today, yet the median work week is still at 40 hours.

Outside of a potential tech singularity born from a artificial superintelligence, things will proceed how they have throughout history: minor iterative progress most of the time, sudden rapid development in a few particular industries for a few years, then back to minor iterative progress.

Keynes thought we'd all be working 5-15 hour weeks at most by the 70s yet that was obviously wrong.

It's entirely possible that many of us (especially in white-collar jobs) are indeed working 5-15 hour weeks spread out over 40 hours. Competition is tight, and nobody wants to look like they're not trying hard, so we go easy on ourselves rather than visibly negotiating for reduced hours. Various companies have experimented with four-day weeks and they don't seem to have resulted in big productivity drops*, suggesting that the same amount of work could potentially be done in fewer hours if the will was there and pressure was applied.

*Obviously difficult to measure and prone to biased reporting. Notably companies don't tend to keep four-day weeks once the experiment ends, although this may result from inertia or a desire to look competitive in the market.

https://gizmodo.com/four-day-work-week-work-from-home-return-to-office-1849562791

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-microsoft-japan_n_5d77c236e4b0fde50c2dec9a