We will all have more leisure time in the future: Difference between revisions

}}The idea, propagated by [[thought leader]]s like {{author|Ray Kurzweil}}<ref>{{br|The Singularity is Near}}</ref> and more recently erstwhile DB boss John Cryan<ref>[[Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated - technology article|Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated]].</ref> and heir to the Susskind pofessional clairvoyance dynasty {{author|Daniel Susskind}}<ref>{{br|A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond}}. See also {{author|David Goodhart}}’s more thoughtful (but still, on this point, misguided) {{br|Head Hand Heart}}.</ref> that [[Chatbot|robots]] and [[artificial intelligence]] will, shortly, entirely supplant the need for human labour.  

Thus, our most pressing problem: ''what to do with all the spare time we’ll suddenly have?''

Seeing as the [[meatware]] will no longer be needed to operate [[Jacquard loom]]s, wipe bottoms, write [[A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond - Book Review|wishful dystopian techno-political tracts]] or [[Change manager|manage business change programmes]], we will loaf around instead, playing [[chess]] and drinking grappa in the Peloponnese, the way Mediterranean pensioners have since time immemorial.  

Sounds great, doesn’t it! (Best not to dwell on the thought that the robo-slave serving the grappa and wiping our arses could wipe the floor with us at [[chess]], too, if it wanted to.)

Now if something about this scenario nudges your implausibility hooter, you would not be alone: there are at least two of us.  

For one thing, recent experience which, from our [[perspective chauvinism|vantage point]], has been some kind of [[Cambrian explosion]] over thirty or more years, so far has had ''quite the opposite effect''. There is more work than ever. Granted, [[internal audit]], software [[change manager|change management]] and operations analytics might not be the effervescent future any of us envisaged as wild undergraduate dreamers — but [[who breaks a butterfly on a wheel]]? Knowing that might have crushed the very will to power within each of us, like a painted flower. That was then: now that [[book of work]] it is well and truly barricades the way to that chessboard in Στούπα.

 

But, but, but: ''[[this time is different]]''. This time the machines

*that all labour activities in the economy can, and before long, will have been articulated in such a way that they can be entirely, reliably and cheaply carried out by [[artificial intelligence]];|