Some of the world’s most successful business leaders, including Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon, have recently suggested that advancements in artificial intelligence will cut the workweek down to just three or three and a half days. Others aren’t so convinced.
In a November episode of the What Now? With Trevor Noah podcast the former Microsoft chief executive described a world where machines do most of the labour, while humans earn a comfortable living working three days a week. Those comments followed a similar statement by Mr. Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who told Bloomberg, “your children will live to 100 and not have cancer because of [medical advancements in] technology, and literally they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week.”
The quickly developing technology is poised to dramatically increase productivity across a range of industries and functions, and while some suggest those gains will translate into fewer working hours, others fear it could result in fewer workers.
“Just because we can be more productive doesn’t mean we’ll work less time,” said Vered Shwartz, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, and AI chair at the Vector Institute. “There’s a good chance that it creates the expectation for workers to do more, be even more productive, and some employers will decide to lay off people before they reduce the workweek.”
A recent study published by MIT’s Sloan School of Management suggests that new generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT improve worker performance by as much as 40 per cent.
However, Ms. Shwartz points to the significant technological advancements and productivity gains realized in the past century since the five-day workweek became standard, to highlight how even when technology improves productivity, it hasn’t reduced working days.
“It will change our work, I don’t think it will make us work less,” she said. “We will come up with new tasks to fill up our days, and I’m very skeptical that employers will tell employees they can work less and get paid the same.”
There are, however, some employers that are doing just that. While still far from mainstream, some organizations in Canada and around that world have transitioned to a four-day workweek, and studies suggest many do so without negatively affecting productivity. As a result, some experts suggest that more powerful technologies will enable even more reductions in work time.
“There is not a linear relationship between time worked and productivity,” said John Trougakos, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
He said there is often a “diminishing rate of return” on work, suggesting that all working hours are not the same, especially toward the end of a long day. He believes taking away those less productive hours in service of improving focus and concentration during the remaining hours can results in an equal or greater overall output.
“I say this to my students; by the time you’re into the fourth, fifth, sixth hour of studying, how many times do you read a paragraph five times, because it takes more concentration?” he said. “We also know that when people work longer hours and they’re tired they make mistakes, accidents happen, there’s a whole bunch of inefficiencies that happen, so from a productivity perspective there’s a reasonable case to be made that this is the way to go in the future.”
Mr. Trougakos adds that he also sees his students – and young people more broadly – demonstrating a different relationship with work than generations prior.
“Younger generations of workers prioritize personal time and life experiences more than, say, baby boomers, who focused more on their careers,” he said. “Reduced work-time models are showing promise – they’re not just some magical utopian dream, they are real – the next question is, ‘how far can we take this?’ and that’s what these leaders are voicing.”
The fact that Mr. Gates and Mr. Dimon are openly talking about AI potentially enabling reduced work time is significant, but not as significant as actually putting some of those ideas into practice among the staff they employ or the myriad companies they advise and invest in, according to Joe O’Connor, the chief executive officer of the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence in Toronto. “Of course, it could happen,” he said. “But whether it does happen or not, people like Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon probably have a bigger say in that than most.”
Mr. O’Connor adds these billionaires are far from the first men of influence to make such prognostications. During the Great Depression economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that a 15-hour workweek would become a reality within 100 years; in 1956 then-Vice President Richard Nixon predicted a four-day workweek in the “not too distant future.”
“If you take what Keynes said in the 1930s, you could say he was totally, wildly wrong, he was a million miles off base, but if you look closer at his predictions around technological advancement and productivity growth, he was absolutely spot on,” Mr. O’Connor said.
He adds that new advancements in technology will inevitably result in significant productivity gains, but whether those efficiencies benefit workers through reduced worktime or business leaders through greater profits remains an open question.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that AI has the potential to make either of those eventualities happen,” Mr. O’Connor said. “But I don’t think any of us can make any assumptions that we’ll end up taking one path over the other.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story suggested Vered Shwartz was skeptical of the finding of an MIT study. In fact, she was referencing a different study. This version has been corrected.