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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."
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by hwertz on Monday October 14 2019, @04:45PM (1 child)
Problem there is, with the large per-employee overheads (all the junk the gov't makes the employer pay for*) and corporate zeal for efficiency, any job that could allow a 12 hour work week would instead have 1/4 to 1/5th the people working a 48 to 60 hour work week.
Effectively that kind of thing was in progress where I worked a while back. They had some production lines originally meant for two people. These are automated enough to be fairly easy with two people on them. You'd have two people on each line, and a "floater" that covered a group of 5 or 6 lines that'd float around and help if a line needed supplies or got behind or cover for break or lunch. So they found one person per line could (just!) keep up and did that (not firings, just having people move out to other work areas). Then sped up the lines a little bit. So then one person is watching for production problems, running quality checks, packaging finished product (which would give you all of about 45 seconds to run a full loop), and top up supplies when needed. Then, they decided they didn't need the floater, so you didn't have the option of having them grab supplies and no-one to help if someone got behind (it was easy to fall behind when the packaging equipment started acting up; then you were fixing that and having to catch up on packaging, all while maintaining that 45 seconds loop supposedly.) Also meant when someone went on break or lunch you had someone covering TWO machines as best they can. Oh, and they found they were running shorthanded on other shifts too so we started getting like 10-20 hours a week of forced overtime plus a forced saturday once or twice a month. Which paid good, but was wiping me the hell out.
Just saying, I can see very few businesses deciding to hire people for a 12 hour work week when they can have 1/4 the people work 48 hours instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 14 2019, @06:46PM
Huh - we work for the same people?
On top of all of that, they wonder why they can't get good people, and when they do get a good one, they can't keep him/her.
But, who are we to complain? The idiots in the office all have degrees, so they must be a helluva lot smarter than we are!!
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