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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Billionaire Jack Ma, long an outspoken advocate for China's extreme work culture, says that people should be able to work just 12 hours a week with the benefits of artificial intelligence.
People could work as little as three days a week, four hours a day with the help of technology advances and a reform in education systems, the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai Thursday. He spoke on-stage with Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. who is building manufacturing facilities in the city.
[...] Just this year, Ma endorsed the China tech sector's infamous 12-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week routine, so common it earned the moniker 996. In one blog post, China's richest man this year dismissed people who expect a typical eight-hour office lifestyle, defying a growing popular backlash.
"I don't worry about jobs," Ma said on Thursday, making an optimistic case that AI will help humans rather than just eliminate their work. "Computers only have chips, men have the heart. It's the heart where the wisdom comes from."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Informative) by DutchUncle on Monday October 14 2019, @04:36PM (2 children)
Futurists were expecting that the 6-day business week would consist of halves of the work force working 3-day weeks of the then-typical 8-hour shift. Instead we got half of the work force working longer hours, and the rest either unemployed or "gig economy".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 14 2019, @05:13PM
There's a lot of "big lie" in the workforce, too. One example is an M.D. I knew who was "so busy" - he had a practice south of town, did rounds at not one but two hospitals, and worked with our company too... well, that practice only opened one or two days a week, for a max of about 4 hours at a time, rounds at the hospitals were once a week for a couple of hours total including drive time, and he'd show up at our company about twice a month on average, never for more than an hour or two. His "busy days" included stop-off at the spa, extended lunches, etc. With all that "he's busy somewhere else right now" imagery to go around, he was probably working about 20 hours a week - netting a fine total takehome pay from his four income sources.
This is replicated around the workforce, from the Wallys that show up to work and do nothing, to the travelling managers who are on the road so much it's hard to know where they are at any given time.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by ChrisMaple on Monday October 14 2019, @05:33PM
The futurists may not be properly considering farmers, who to some extent work unlimited hours and always have. In the U.S., they have only become statistically insignificant as a portion of the population in the last 30 or 40 years.