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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.
What is this actually supposed to do? If you want to work 4 days a week, 6 hours a day, you already can.
Well, the real problem is that there isn't a finite amount of work to be done. The AI taking over a lot of human work because they can do the work of a bajillion people doesn't mean there's no longer work for humans to do.
You actually cannot in most of the white collar world, it's extremely inflexible. Also, it's supposed to increase human flourishing and give us more time to spend on things we want to do! Ideally help people grow.
Imagine this attitude back when work was 7 days a week, 12 hour days. Work is a necessity, ideally we live as well or perhaps work on projects more aligned to our souls when we have more free time.
I do agree that there's always more work to do. I think our modern economy doesn't value the type of work left to be done very well, namely spiritual / emotional / community work.
Working in the white collar world is a choice, primarily done for money. If you don't care about the money, you can already go to a different sector with less rigid hours. If you do care about the money, it's not clear how a four day work week will make as much as a five day work week absent fiat government transfers, such as UBI.
This is an evergreen argument that has always been made regardless of the tech level. Why was it not compelling enough before, aside from the need/desire for more money?
Note the lack of limiting factor here. What [necessity] makes four days a week of drudgery any more reasonable than seven days, beyond current attitudes? Why should it not be viewed as soul-crushing and the [necessity] of work be paired back to 3 days of work a week?
And rightly so. People terribly interested in other how other people organize their spiritual / emotional / community affairs tend to be petty tyrants on how others should value such things if they themselves are not preoccupied.
If you want to work for money you can also work 6 days a week over 5 and get more money, and yet very few people, even those who enter the white collar world for money, do this. If there's a societal shift working Fridays is going to end up looking as quaint to Westerners as working Saturdays does to the right now (plenty of parts of the world where working Saturdays is normalized). We keep it at 4 days to start with because we need to take baby steps, it's a small move of the Schilling fence and once its normalised and if productivity has gone up so much we can shift over to a 3 day week as a society then we'll do that, the down to 2 days and so on if general societal productivity allows it.
Thank you! I am surprised by how few people even on the Motte are able to understand this. I would think societal lock-in effects & coordination points would be well understood.
It's not that people don't 'understand.' It's that it's not itself a complete argument. It is merely preference sharing ('wouldn't it be nice if'), no different than if you said 'wouldn't it be nice if people valued peace more and didn't have wars?' People don't value peace more, for reasons related to the stark differences in preferences compared to you. Therefore, the policy fails to persuade when it rests on a flawed premise- and when a premise is 'everyone should go along with my preferences,' blaming the audience for not getting your genius says more about you than them.
If your argument is merely preferences, it has no weight over other people's preferences, i.e. to make more money or advance projects that require prolonged effort. And without some other mechanism- who is to bring this about, by what means, with what coercive authority against dissidents- it fails as a social policy. There is a reason that Count has to appeal to emergent cultural evolution as an analogy for a deliberate cultural engineering, and it's related to the reason he avoids addressing the factors that actually were involved for that past shift that are not applicable to the current. Like, for example, that there was no centralized policy shift that initiated the change from the top down.
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Most white collar work in the US might be willing to let you come in on saturday, but it doesn't actually pay more- white collar workers are paid on a set salary regardless of hours.
Yes, and if working Saturdays were expected of you you'd be getting paid more for the job. If you're arguing instead that as a white collar worker you're paid for what you produce rather than time put in then yes, I agree, if through future tech people are able to do in 4 days what they currently need to do in 5 then we should move over to 4 day work week as standard: the results produced by the job are the same for the same pay for the employee, they just get an extra day of the week free for them to do what they want with. It'd be the great increase to general societal welfare in the last 100 years. There's no reason why the benefits of the extra productivity should accrue to the owners of capital rather than labour.
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My friend, once upon a time working on Sunday was not done. Then it was done but in exceptional circumstances and you got paid double time for working on Sunday. Now, in a lot of jobs, working weekends is part of the job, you don't get paid extra for working those days, and maybe you only have work every other weekend. But you still have to work it. (And it used to be that working half-days on Saturdays was normal before unions got strong, which is what I think you are referring to with "as working Saturdays does to the right now)".
Think of the jobs where it's "my weekend is free, now I want to go shopping/eat out/visit this attraction". People have to work in those places to provide the services for the people not working on the weekend.
Plenty of people in the West work Saturdays and Sundays.
(There also used to be a custom called half-day closing during the week, generally on Wednesday or Thursday. That's gone too, now those days are full work days).
Plenty of people work weekends, but far, far less than a century or two ago.
You are in a humongous bubble if you think working on Saturday or Sunday is anywhere near normal. It's a very small amount of jobs that do this sort of thing. (Unless you mean working weekends but still 5 days a week.)
It's absolutely possible for us to shift the societally acceptable norm to 4 days a week instead of 5.
The service industry has lots of six day work weeks. It's pretty standard in restaurants for managers and chefs to get one day off per week(mon-wed) and be on call for the rest of their non-scheduled time.
For managers and chefs, sure. That's nowhere near the majority of workers. That's also a norm that could be changed with enough pressure from organized labor.
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I assume this was meant to be some combination of Schelling point and Chesterton’s fence; otherwise I’m not sure what the pre-Euro currency of Austria has to do with fences.
Schilling fences are a recognised term going back to the Great Scott himself: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes
Title of your linked article
You are being teased for a typo, Count.
Ah, my fault, I didn't even know they were spelt differently.
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All hail Great Scott, the appointed mouthpiece of Sophia.
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See "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" by Scott Alexander.
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