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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).
A network of N people working on a problem requires at least order
logNoverhead to synchronize their efforts and receive instructions/feedback.So unless someone accepts working 75% time for 50% pay, they are gonna naturally scale to working more.
No, it's not O(log(N)) overhead. It's at least O(N) overhead. O(log(N)) is the depth of the hierarchy, but the entire thing is O(N). That is, the number of people doing the coordination tasks is a linear function of those doing the work.
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Fortunate log(N) grows really slowly compared to N. Doubling N only requires adding a constant amount of extra overhead regardless of how big your company is, which can easily be handled by big employers.
The true extra costs of doubling N is the doubling of the total salaries you'll have to pay out, not the O(log(N)) extra overhead and if AI increases productivity to the point where the former is viable then the increased costs of the latter will be easily covered by a few extra months of productivity gains, your argument is at best one that this transition might have to be delayed for a few months to account for overhead costs, not one that it's not feasible.
You're already getting O(N) increase in costs due to the extra headcount by paying people the same but working them for half as long, the O(log(N)) increase in overhead is a minor triviality compared to that.
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