Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where ‘machines can make all the food and stuff’ isn’t a bad idea::“A society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK,” Bill Gates said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Noah asked about the threat of artificial intelligence to jobs, Gates said there could one day be a time when humans “don’t have to work so hard.”
While artificial intelligence could bring about some positive change, Gates has previously acknowledged the risks of AI if it’s misused.
Word processing applications didn’t do away with office work, but they changed it forever," Gates said at the time.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the next generation of workers will only have a 3.5-day work week due to AI.
“Your children will live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology and they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week,” Dimon told Bloomberg in October.
Gates once viewed sleep as lazy and told Noah that his life was all about Microsoft from the ages 18 to 40 years old.
The original article contains 335 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No one wants to work. They want to feel valued, and be productive. So let’s just make it where working isn’t a necessity, pls.
I don’t want to feel valued or productive, so I don’t work
You can get both of those things without working. But if you don’t want them, that’s fine.
We’re already at the point where don’t have to work 4 days a week tho.
We do if we want to pay the rent.
From the employee perspective yes, we have to work 4 days a week, but from the employer perspective, there’s no need to work 4 days a week. In fact, it’s even less productive than working 5 days a week.
Sometimes I wonder what they would do if you could make endless perfect copies of objects like you can mp3s.
Dududdo you wouldn’t copy a car. You wouldn’t copy a cheeseburger Copying is a crime.
Like remember it’s only been recently that it became possible to make endless copies of media at effectively no cost.
They would figure it out some way to enforce artificial scarcity. Can’t have poor people getting free stuff without being worthy.
Can I introduce you to Star Trek?
In The Orville (Seth MacFarlane Star Trek-like show) they actually have a brief discussion about how if that technology was plonked into a world like we have today, it would not be used to make life better for everyone. It would be capitalised on.
Imagine if you could create food at no cost. You think everyone is getting fed, or do you think one company is going to have massive profit margins selling food that it costs nothing to produce?
I don’t remember that bit but I think I only watched the first season of the Orville and that was years ago.
But yeah really depends on how difficult the equipment itself is to replicate.
If it’s some massive machine the size of a room it’s going to make some company extremely rich, they’d sell product for slightly less than normal market value taking over the market with perfectly consistent product and insane margins allowing legal capture.
Why feed everyone when you can almost literally print money?
If it’s something small that can be easily transported and duplicated? Piracy. Nobody will give AF about patents and everyone will have them within a couple years no matter what laws they try to implement or how they try and prevent it.
This has actually already happened with media and this is exactly how it has played out and a lot of people still seem to be in denial.
They can complain and sick lawyers on as many people as they want but they can still make a million copies of something that cost 400 million to make for less than than the cost of a gumball.
The law surrounding it is completely broken and it’s crazy that so many industries are trying to continue on like nothing has changed.
I think it was a 30 second part of the last episode in season 3, I watched it (for the first time) recently so remember it.
I guess it depends who develops it. If Apple invent it then you can be sure they aren’t selling them to anyone else, it will just be secretly used to print iPhones and no one else will have access to one, so no piracy of iPhones.
If a third party company invents it then starts trying to sell them to other companies, then maybe that outcome will be better.
If it’s room sized and sold to other companies it will rapidly be in multiple countries.
There wouldn’t be any way to keep it to one company with it being public knowledge.
Like realistically I’d think any country would ignore whatever laws on the books and just outright sieze the tech as a matter of national security and duplicate it for their own use if they found out a company was hiding such a thing.
From there it’d again leak to all other major countries in short order.
If it’s small and easy to duplicate, (can it replicate itself?) It would spread like wildfire and would like piracy be completely uncontainable.
I don’t think there is anyway the tech could be either contained or kept secret any real length of time.
Hmm you make a good point. I was assuming Apple would just claim a sort of trade secret, I hadn’t thought that governments may seize it.
The other thing is that technology doesn’t really go nothing->machine that replicates anything
Most likely it will start with a machine that can 3d print edible apples from shelf stable source material or something like that. Then someone improves it to be able to do any fruit from the same source material. Then someone improves it so if you feed in a range of different source materials (say, a bunch of metals, glass, and plastic) you can print usable electronics or something. Then someone improves it so it can do the same thing but with one mix of materials instead of separate ones. And so one and so one until you can make almost anything.
At the print 3d apples stage, it will probably get sold to the army for supply rations. Then the maker will look for other places to sell it, then when technology advances people will get updated versions. There probably wouldn’t be a benefit to a company hiding it because at any point the difference from the publically available one is not that big.
If you look back at any major invention, lightbulb, radio, etc. You find that in fact these things predated their supposed invention, there was just some small change that made it commercially viable from the previous version.
I’ve always envisioned this type of utopia to be robot based, with a few machines thrown in for sure. I’ve thought if you can robots plant, grow and harvest the raw food. Then have autonomous trucks drive that food to processing plants that then have robots and machines processing it. You then again have autonomous trucks drive it to the grocery “store” that then have robots placing the product you could in theory make all food free*. (add a billion asterisks to that last statement) Making the food free would probably require the entire economy to migrate to robot workers as much as possible or at least have it be where the robots make other robots so at least they are low cost/free to make. It’ll never happen, we’re totally destined for a Cyberpunk future instead of Star Trek future, but it’s at least fun to think about.
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People really need to be reminded how much blood it took for us to get a fucking weekend.
Didn’t we get one day a week since the Old Testament? And then we got a second day because new sky giant disagreed with the days from old sky giant?
Well you are right about the first one but also that day was meant to be spent studying up on the importance of hard work and worshipping the man who had earned his free day by putting real work in for 6 days. And then give every last cent you earned extra to an institution that appreciates it and helps buy your way to a perfect workless afterlife.
Correct about Sunday, but a two-day weekend didn’t become a thing until organized labour fought for it in the 20s, and wasn’t codified into law until 1940.
Sounds great. Only question is how we get paid well enough to live. A question which went conveniently unasked and unanswered.
machines will make money for us too, everyone gets a magic money machine
We should stop measuring our productivity in hourly and need to go back to salary well paying positions, or everyone needs to share the costs with UBI instead.
Salaried wages don’t make sense for a whole lot of positions tho - like you’d have 0 manufacturing employees.
“machines can make all the food and stuff”
Don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have maintainence and repair robots as well, so what manufacturing employees?
There will, for all of the foreseeable future, be a human element in every manufacturing or farming process.
AI can beat replace repeatable behaviors. There will always be someone on-site to address outlier situations.
Exactly, and it shouldn’t be hard to find someone willing to do that job for 3 days a week.
Sure but they’re not gonna want to do it as a salaried employee, because the random overtime required will be more valuable.
That really depends on weather we can create AGI or not. Might come sonner than you think.
If we invent AGI all bets are off for everything though. That’s a discovery on par with fire or the wheel.
Sounds like a skilled job for me that ought to be paid then
The point is salaried workers generally would make less.
Good luck convincing companies to change anything that won’t make them more money. I think the only way it can happen is with UBI, hopefully funded by the hoarded assets of the few biggest companies and billionaires where all the money is getting accumulated.
You mean the people who don’t think healthcare should be a right also would not be down with UBI? I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked.
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okay I’ll take it. Bill is one of the few that’s actually thinking things through at least.
Here’s what would happen in capitalist America: entities would own those machines and use them as a means of personal enrichment, it’d displace a ton of human workers, the taxes generated from profits generated wouldn’t offset the economic impacts, and then half of the lawmakers would introduce bills that would provide lucrative incentives to those entities if they maintain a certain ratio of human workers and they’d staple a bunch of regressive crap onto it like abortion or whatever, it wouldn’t pass because the other half of lawmakers would want to tax the hell out of profits made with those machines, government would shut down 4 times a year, Jeff Bezos builds a vacation home on the moon
It’s not a bad idea, but it also can’t exist without a complete re-haul of what it means to live in modern society. Right now, replacing workers and cutting hours means people don’t have enough money to live. That is not an acceptable result of automation. I’m not qualified enough to have a reasonable solution to this, but I know it needs to be addressed before we get to that point.
I do wonder if this is even a money thing as even OpenAI has warned investors that money in the future is not certain. Maybe we are going to be forced to look to alternatives other than money as the means of value?
The machine doesn’t require a salary but instead of sending the money it saves to the workers it replaces it is added to the yearly profits, a three day work week with more automatisation can’t happen before that last part is reversed or there’s extreme deflation happening to compensate for lower wages.
Look at this guy who doesn’t have billions he made from the 90s and 2000s to rely on!
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Some of you [all rich folks] may cry but its a sacrifice I am willing to make
Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing now
Isn’t this the primary argument for universal basic income? If you’re keeping unnecessary jobs around just to give people something to do, you’re not actually keeping them for contributions to society… In the long run ubi could probably even be cheaper than paying to prop up obsolete and wholly unnecessary industries.
While true, UBI would have to be funded by corporate tax.
“We no longer need people to be able to sell and deliver our products”
^ Win for the corporations
“Virtually no (low-income) property is unoccupied now. And my middle class tenants are making more from UBI, so I raised rent”
^ Win for landlords (which are mostly corporations)
“We can now demographically target ads to UBI payouts to get people to spend their money”
^ Win for corporations
It continues, but the general idea is that, while the populace could benefit from UBI, if it just comes from their taxes it’s not going to shrink class division in any way, but increase it
Yes, funding UBI with raised corporate taxes is absolutely not optional, I agree completely.
At the end of the day, simplified, UBI means: massive cuts to the workforce, in lieu of technology that can perform the exact same tasks more efficiently, for less; all the while paying people money at the same or similar levels of what they earned before.
It would be insane to assume the former would just grow wealthier over night while the latter is relegated to being financed by - in this example - wishful thinking. The money’s gotta come from somewhere, and it makes sense it be the same place it’s (supposed to be) coming from now.
If everyone gets UBI, I assume it is still optional to work. Otherwise no one would produce goods and services that we consume in order to live. Or at least fixing the robots.
I assume the incentive for that is additional income.
Wouldn’t this then create an even larger gap in income inequality? And further dilute the spending power of those who are only able to collect UBI?
It would, yes. But, the argument is that a person who wants a higher quality of life than “simply living” would be expected to work.
The right to life is, this way, protected - the right to a quality life, similar to today, would still have to be earned. This is in addition to the social pressure to work.
Also, one idea is that UBI would give people the financial space to pursue their own interests which in turn could easily --at least in some cases-- be turned into productive businesses of their own.
You know what sounds even better? Turning this dude into ground meat
So soft and buttery I bet.
“I mean, it’s sure been great for me folks!”
I remember him saying that computers would make people work less by being more productive, but in the end the difference was pocketed by the rich. I don’t think it’s just a technology problem…
It’s all about power. The 1% will not give up their power ( = the opportunity to do whatever they want whenever they want) just because it would be good for the 99% to work less.
That’s not how the world works.
The 1% will continue to make sure that they are in control of whatever the next thing is that grant them the same or more power.
If owning AI gives them power they will do whatever necessary to own AI and let’s not kid ourselves here “they” would be you and me if we had the chance.
It took me way too long to realize that a lot of people think like you do and then project it onto the rest of us.
No. If I’m being honest, I would pass at the chance to have power. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’d do the right thing with it. I have a small handful of people who have suffered at my hands throughout my life and I have a hard enough time sleeping over that.
To know that I was making the quality of life worse for people who I’d never even know for my own sake would break me. I’d deserve it too.
Unfortunately, the people who I’ve know that exercise power over their fellow man don’t seem to lose a wink of sleep. They justify everything, but they’re miserable and they don’t have any real friends. They’re constantly paranoid that people are out to take something from them because they are. Some people try to reach the pockets above the foot on their back to take what they can from the situation. I can’t relate to them either, but I can at least empathize with them.
Power corrupts, dilute it as much as possible.
We need a branch of government filled with random people. Politicians are people who seek power, the type of person that wins big elections is not a normal person, thus, normal people are not represented in government.
In the US, I wish the house were filled with random people. Randomly select 3 people for each house seat, have the 3 people debate and explain their personal beliefs, and then people vote. This would fill the seat with someone who is mostly likeable, but is still a normal person and not a career politician.
There is the G1000 initiative in Belgium and the Netherlands. The idea is to have the legislative body be random people. There are even towns that already have implemented it. The concept is simple enough: representative democracy is inherently flawed, so just have legislators drawn by a lottery. With a high enough amount of people, you will get a near perfect representation of the population proportionally represented. For national bodies, the proposal is to have 1000 legislators, hence the number.
Personally I quite like the idea, especially if it were to be paired with a technocratic executive branch.
Too bad the Netherlands is about to go down the shitter with their mini-Hitler.
It has never been a technology problem.
If society was build correct in a democracy, advances in all fields would always be for benefitting the people and the majority.
This has been a problem ever since the industrial revolution and what caused the great depression.
If technology advances to a stage where we only need 75% of the current work force, the answer is not to fire 25%. It is for everyone to benefit and work 25% less or get 25% more pay. (or 12,5% work less and 12,5% more pay. Our choice)
That is a working democracy.
You should get 33% more pay as the full work force productivity would be 4/3 of the original in your example.
This difference might be clearer with an example where only half of the work force is required to match the original productivity. In this case, if the full work force continues to work, productivity is presumably doubled. That’s not a 50% increase. It’s 200% of the original or a 100% increase. So the trade-off should be between 50% fewer working hours and 100% more pay.
Of course, instead you’ll work the same hours for the same pay and some shareholders pocket that 100% difference.
Communist!
/s (well kinda)
The term you’ll get more mileage out of here is Luddite.
The looms are stealing our jobs, so we should organize against them.
I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.
So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work
Yea sure, and then slowly slowly even stop those who work 3 per days, right? So the AI csn do all the job. Now they lose money, but once they put AI they will only win money.
AI is good, they develop AI to help us, and then, one day will ditch us.
It is easier to have AI optimize the bullshit jobs than the shit jobs.
Yay! Pay cuts for everyone!
Assuming the owners of those machines don’t restrict the people’s access to that “food and stuff”
You think Bill Gates of all people don’t know that? He’s just trying to gaslight us into thinking the stupid-rich gigacorporation owners like him are the solution and not the problem.
I don’t know about that. Young ruthless Bill Gates was another person, older and wiser Bill Gates has already achieved richest person in the world, Forbes #1, etc etc - all that’s in the rearview mirror - I believe he has awakened and realized it takes a village and he wants his legacy to reflect that
Bill Gates hasn’t really changed dude. He’s just developed a thicker veneer. He’s the largest landowner in the US now, because he’s been buying up as much arable land as possible. He can say its BAU all he wants, it’s incredibly sketchy af. Now in conjunction with this statement, its easy to see where once he cornered the software market, you could infer he’s aspiring to do the same with food with full automation.
Michael Burry (guy from the big short) has been doing the same. We all know climate change is going to fuck us, we all know we are headed towards serious water shortages, etc - these guys also know and have money to position themselves - for what final gameplan I don’t know, but at least with Gates his recent history has shown a care for the greater good for humanity at least. Can’t say the same for other billionaires.
I know Bills history pretty well, I just see a difference between him now and how he was a ruthless businessman in his prior life. Maybe he has me fooled, but I don’t really see it other than people’s conspiracy theory stuff. Guys like Elon are another story though
What’s more likely, a complete reversal of his world view, or a good PR team and some coaching. I’m not buying the first, especially considering that his Jeffrey Epstein association came after he left MS and started running his charitable foundation.
Just goes to show how you can change your public image with shit loads of money. He just laundered his image real good and you just ate it up.
He has not “awakened” to anything. He’s just very good at selling his BS. What’s even worse is that now if you bring up his shitty ways, you are associated with the anti vax idiots.
People who sell things that are in high demand and necessary for survival generally are not in the practice of denying people access to those things.
Um healthcare?
Health care providers are not in the habit of denying care. Health insurers are because they have a perverse incentives to do so - this is why they should not exist
Exactly the people who sell the thing in high demand the issurers are in the business of denying care to people by raising prices on healthcare. I feel like your mind is in the right place I agree insurance companies shouldn’t exist but what you said in your first comment is false large companies who sell high demand products absolutely gouge on prices all of the time.
That’s literally not true though. They compete with each other over offering the lowest price.
In what world? Outside of government exchanges, you’re limited to the plan your employer offers you.
We were discussing large corps that aren’t insurance companies
That’s funny. In reality they compete on increasing shareholder profits by colluding on prices and paying their employees as little as possible. And to be crystal clear “they” are the CEOS/boards of most major companies.
This is not at all how businesses operate lol
Also, What mind bending drugs are you on? Healthcare is riddled with examples of denied insurance claims for treatments.
denying people access to those things.
The only way I can reconcile your statement is if you finish it with “if they can afford it”. Which also makes your statement meaningless. No one was ever arguing that business denies products/services to those who can pay for them.
Health care, food, and shelter are all in high demand, necessary for survival, and if you can’t afford it, you are denied it.
No one was ever arguing that business denies products/services to those who can pay for them.
“If they can afford it” suggests otherwise.
Yes, things do indeed cost money and always will until we discover replicator tech.
Then i have got a bridge to sell you. Its quite necessary you see…
if you won’t deny a thing to someone it’s pretty hard to sell it to anyone
When I was a child I envisioned fully automated luxury communism driven by robots and AI.
Realizing that wouldn’t happen for the dumbest possible reasons as a teen/young adult was immeasurably disappointing
