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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @02:52AM (6 children)
A few landlords own a ton of property (ie: my landlord). Most people rent from a landlord that owns more than one property. Population rate keeps increasing. So rent keeps going up because landlords benefit from plenty of competing tenants but tenants don't benefit from nearly as many competing landlords. As long as you want to live in a house, eat food, etc... if there is someone else willing to work more than 40+ hours per week for those same things then you must do the same to compete. Technology can not change this. If you have a growing population of 1000 people but there are only 100 houses for them to live in then you have a lot of competition if you want to live in one of them and not have to live with 10 other tenants.
Technological advancements in one area will just force everyone to compete 40+ hours a week elsewhere or to even do something for cheaper than the tech in a given sector where this is possible requiring people to work more hours to make enough money to compete with the tech at a lower pay rate.
You essentially work for your landlord regardless.
Inflation and high taxes that the government squanders don't help as inflation is a tax on your savings and a tax is the benefits of your labor being taken from you and given to benefit someone else.
Plus often times technological efficiencies make it more affordable for (uneducated) people to have more children. They have more children and that more than negates these efficiencies in the long term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @02:56AM
Plus, often times 'efficiencies' are simply more effective ways to exploit/exhaust the environment. Good in the short term, bad in the long term.
An example is a fishers net. May make it easier to catch more fish, resulting in a population boom ... until the fish run out more quickly.
Regardless, none of this really refutes economic theory. First of all economic theory is a model that makes some assumptions. It works very well under those assumptions but economists do not claim that those assumptions are always true. They're not. While those assumptions aren't always true economic theory helps explain so much when you make those assumptions because those assumptions are often true. No model is perfect but some models are useful (under the right conditions).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 15 2019, @07:53AM (4 children)
Not actually. Developed world, that is, the entire developed world, has negative population rate once you exclude first and second generation immigrants. And nobody has an increasing exponential rate, it is universally declining worldwide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @08:18AM (3 children)
Population keeps increasing * is what I should have said.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 15 2019, @02:54PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15 2019, @09:04PM (1 child)
and part of that is due to improvements in technology with respect to birth control. Birth control has gotten cheaper, more effective, and has fewer side effects.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 16 2019, @12:40AM
In any case, that's the solution to overpopulation: birth control, women's emancipation, and growing wealth of the global populace. It's all there.