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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.
In some industries, ObamaCare already did this -- the mandate for insurance kicks in at 30 hours.
But in other industries this is counterproductive. Those have overhead: training, management and communication (synchronization) that doesn't allow work to just scale. In a competitive market, those firms would always rather pay fewer employees proportionally more -- and those firms would outcompete those paying more employees proportionally less.
So you cannot "just shorten the work week" -- at least not for a large sector of the economy.
I liked the suggestion elsewhere in this thread that "white collar" work is that which the mythical man month does not apply to: 40 different rides with 40 Uber drivers is pretty much linear scaling, but 40 software engineers working 1 hour a week won't get anything done where one working solo full-time might.
Notably, medicine has adopted grueling shift lengths because shift changeovers are bad for patient outcomes.
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