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I'm thinking about the culture war around AI, specifically the whole UBI debate. If AI truly does take over a lot of human work, there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works, besides we aren't even close to being able to afford that. The left (generally) takes the former, while the right generally takes the latter.
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
If AI truly will obviate the need for a lot of work, how is this not the more rational solution than trying to magically create a UBI out of money we don't have? How come this idea has barely even entered the discourse? I have been talking and thinking about AI unemployment for years and never once have heard someone argue for this compromise.
This is obviously the correct solution. AI is going to reduce the need for human labour by increasing productivity; rather than transferring the fruits of this productivity to the owners of capital it's much better to transfer it to labour instead by mandating a three (or even two) day work week as standard on the same pay as before, thereby not only creating a lot of jobs to coutneract the job loss from AI but also helping people get more of their own free time.
I've long been a proponent of a forced average long term (over say 6 months) 40 hour work week for Investment Banks etc., sure they can make you work a 100 hour week when a deal is close but to make up for that they need to give you a week and a half off to rest and recover. If the IB wants to preserve its man hours it can simply hire a lot more people, it's not like there's a shortage of capable people who want to go in that area or they don't have the money to do this.
The reason this doesn't happen is simply because the people at the top want to maximize their "PnL per partner" which is an argument I've started to see as more and more bullshit over the years (if you're happy with a yearly $2 million PnL per partner you shouldn't be any less or more happy if the people in $RIVAL_BANK are making $0.5 million or $5 million in PnL per partner, anything else is just PnL envy and should be beaten out of you by the government).
High praise coming from mister Count! Yes to me it seems obviously far more elegant than the frankly idiotic arguments for UBI that often get bandied about by otherwise very smart people.
Interesting, so you think that this idea is unpopular because it would basically increase the amount of internal competition in corporate hierarchies?
Nah, I don't think the people in charge of decisions like this think far enough ahead to consider the increased amount of internal competition etc., rather their thought process is a lot more base: they want to win the status competition with their current peers, and the way they do this is by having higher PnL per partner etc (PnL envy, like I said) and if they have to treat their workers as badly as possible to eek out those last few percentages then they'll absolutely do that for their own self ego.
Story I was told about someone who witnessed this event first hand (and who I have reasons to trust): Apparently one year Ken Griffin (Citadel dude) got visibly super angry at his senior team and demanded changes because Millennium (run by rival Izzy Englander) had managed to make more money than Citadel had done that year, even though it had been a very good year for Citadel compared to its average performance too. People like that don't belong anywhere near the reins of power in a society that has its head screwed on correctly.
Yeah frankly I think a lot of this sort of behavior is downstream of the breakdown in a shared cultural narrative, or perhaps religion if you want to put it that way. You need some sort of overarching structure to help coordinate elites to a similar goal, even if just ostensibly. Doesn't matter if the elites really believe it, it creates strong incentives for them to act certain ways. (There's still abuse etc, but it's mitigated a lot in my view.)
Once that shared moral framework breaks down, you just get the most base and vulgar stuff like you're describing, where people are nakedly fighting for their own power.
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