Are we about to enter an age of leisure?
Don’t bet on it

1 The notion that artificial intelligence will usher in a future in which we only work three days a week might sound to many like a utopian dream.

2 But some investors are betting good money on it.

3 Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood talent agent and sports tycoon, said last week he had raised almost $3bn from investors for a new events venture in a bet that AI would reduce the length of the work week and give people more free time to go to see live sports and music.

1 Is this a good bet?

2 The idea that technological progress can enable people to work fewer hours is not outlandish.

3 Beginning in the 19th century, working hours in many industrial countries gradually reduced as economies grew richer.

4 Indeed, this increase in leisure was “counted as one of the great blessings of technology”, according to historian Benjamin Hunnicutt in his book Free Time.

5 The typical worker in the UK today, for example, works about half the number of hours per week their counterparts in the mid-19th century did.

1 But in order to believe a similar trend is going to take hold again, you have to assume three things.

2 First: that AI will deliver a substantial boost to economic productivity.

3 For now, that is highly uncertain.

4 While some professionals such as computer programmers report vast productivity savings in their own jobs, there is little evidence yet of substantial gains at the macroeconomic level.

5 Indeed, some experts believe the rush to adopt generative AI has had a deleterious effect on productivity in white-collar roles.

6 A recent Harvard Business Review article coined the term “workslop” to describe a proliferation of “low effort, unhelpful AI-generated work” which simply “shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work”.

1 That said, it may take time for companies to make best use of the new technology.

2 The productivity gains from the invention of electricity and the computer took decades to appear.

1 Second, you have to assume the economic gains will be widely distributed.

2 This, too, is uncertain.

3 Although rising productivity has historically lifted average living standards over the long run, there have been times and places where they have diverged for decades-long stretches, such as at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

4 Now, as then, much will depend on the individual or collective power of workers to claim a share of the proceeds.

1 Third, you have to believe workers will “cash in” those proceeds in the form of extra leisure, rather than higher income.

2 But will they?

3 In many developed countries, there has been a slowdown in the reduction in working hours in recent decades.

4 Hunnicutt’s book is subtitled “The Forgotten American Dream” because US workers seem to have abandoned the pursuit of shorter working hours since the 1970s.

5 In spite of rising productivity, average weekly working hours in the US have stagnated ever since.

1 Far from trading income for leisure, it is the people with the highest salaries who tend to work the longest hours.

2 Why is that?

3 Some economists believe there is simply no limit to our material wants nor our desire to “keep up with the Joneses”.

4 Corporate expectations and fear of job loss play a role too.

1 But that doesn’t mean a different distribution of work and leisure is impossible.

2 As I wrote recently, the Netherlands has already moved quietly towards a four-day week with the shortest working hours in the EU.

3 Much depends on business and culture.

4 Is AI going to usher in an age of leisure?

5 It is not an economically illiterate dream, but unlike Ari Emanuel, I wouldn’t bet on it.

6 And even if it does happen in some economies, the US is probably the last place I would expect to see it.