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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, @02:56AM
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).