Whatever Happened to the 15-Hour Work Week?

by Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space

Hanging up your hat?

For generations, we were told that technology would give us more leisure. Machines would perform the repetitive work. Computers would make offices vastly more efficient. Robots would take over dangerous and unpleasant jobs. And, as productivity increased, people would work fewer hours while enjoying higher standards of living.

Science fiction embraced the idea enthusiastically. The Jetsons imagined a future in which George Jetson's working life seemed remarkably undemanding, while more ambitious visions of post-scarcity societies asked what human beings might do if earning a living ceased to dominate their lives.

The Jetsons, living in Orbit City.

Yet something rather different happened.

We got smartphones that allow the office to follow us home, social media designed to compete relentlessly for our attention, algorithms measuring productivity, and a digital economy in which millions of people are effectively on call throughout the day.

Now artificial intelligence promises another enormous leap in productivity, accompanied by remarkably familiar predictions that technology is about to transform the way we work.

Perhaps it will. But history suggests that increasing productivity and increasing leisure are not necessarily the same thing.

When Economists Imagined a Life of Leisure

The idea that technological progress would dramatically shorten the working week was not confined to science fiction.

In 1930, amid the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, arguing that continued increases in productivity could eventually solve what he called humanity's "economic problem."

His prediction was striking. Within a century, he suggested, people in advanced economies might need to work only around 15 hours a week.

Keynes was not entirely wrong about the productivity revolution that was coming. The economies of today's developed countries produce vastly more per worker than they did in 1930. Technologies that would have seemed miraculous to Keynes are commonplace.

Rising productivity

What didn't happen was the corresponding collapse in working hours. We chose—or perhaps our economic systems chose for us—to consume more rather than work dramatically less.

Homes became larger, we traveled more, and car ownership multiplied. Entire industries arose to provide goods and services that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Expectations of what constitutes a comfortable life increased alongside our ability to produce it.

Technology created abundance, but abundance created new desires.

Science Fiction Asked a Different Question

Some of the most interesting science fiction takes technological abundance as its starting point rather than its conclusion. Iain M. Banks's Culture novels imagine a civilization in which advanced artificial intelligences and almost limitless energy have effectively eliminated material scarcity. People no longer need jobs to survive, and money has largely lost its purpose.

That raises a fascinating question: what do human beings do when they no longer have to work?

More leisure?

Banks's answer is not that they sit around doing nothing. Instead, they pursue art, relationships, adventure, intellectual interests, exploration and, in some cases, interfere more in less advanced civilizations.

Other science-fiction writers have reached very different conclusions. Automation can create utopia, but it can just as easily concentrate power in the hands of those who own the machines, a distinction that seems particularly relevant today.

Enter Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI has revived many of the old predictions about technology and work.

AI can already draft documents, analyse data, generate computer code, translate languages, create images, assist scientific research and automate tasks that once required substantial amounts of human time.

The obvious prediction is that workers will become dramatically more productive.

But what happens to the productivity gains? Suppose a task that once took eight hours can eventually be completed in four. Does the employee go home at lunchtime? Or does the employer expect twice as much work?

That may be one of the defining economic questions of the AI era. Technology doesn't determine the answer. Institutions, markets, corporate structures, government policies and ultimately society do.

Who Owns the Machines?

The Industrial Revolution provides a useful warning.

Mechanisation enormously increased human productivity, but the early factories did not immediately create lives of leisure for their workers. Industrialisation initially brought gruelling hours and often appalling working conditions. Shorter working weeks eventually emerged through a complicated mixture of rising prosperity, legislation, political pressure, and organized labor.

More robots.

The same question now arises in a different form. If artificial intelligence and robotics generate enormous increases in productivity, who owns that increased productive capacity?

If the benefits accrue primarily to the companies controlling the technology, automation could increase inequality even while making society as a whole richer. If the benefits are distributed more widely, technological progress could finally deliver some of the leisure earlier generations expected.

Neither outcome is inevitable.

Perhaps We Asked the Wrong Question

For decades, people have asked whether robots will take our jobs. Perhaps that isn't the most useful question.

A better one might be: If machines can do more of our work, why should humans continue working as much as we do?

Identity and work.

That leads quickly into uncomfortable territory. Much of our identity is bound up with employment. One of the first questions we ask a stranger is, "What do you do?" We often mean, "What do you do for money?"

A genuinely post-work society would therefore require more than new technology. It would require us to reconsider status, purpose, income and the relationship between work and human worth.

Science fiction is particularly good at asking questions like these because it can change the assumptions underpinning society and then explore what happens next.

Remove scarcity; maybe remove the need to work. Remove money. What remains?

Taking the Question to Worldcon

I'll be exploring some of these questions at the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, where I'm moderating a panel called Science Fiction and the Economics of Technology.

The panel description asks a wonderfully simple question: why did we get social media instead of the five-hour workweek?

I suspect there won't be a simple answer.

Technology has unquestionably transformed our lives and, in many respects, made them vastly better. But technological progress doesn't arrive with instructions telling societies how its benefits should be distributed.

Those decisions are made by people.

That is also one of the reasons economics keeps finding its way into my science fiction. Whether I'm writing about asteroid mining, genetic resources, lunar industry or planetary infrastructure, the interesting question is rarely just whether humanity can develop a technology. It is what happens once somebody owns it.

Artificial intelligence may eventually give us another opportunity to make the choice Keynes imagined nearly a century ago.

We could use greater productivity to produce ever more. Or perhaps, eventually, we might decide that one of the greatest luxuries technology can provide is something we can never manufacture more of. Our time.

— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space  and Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse. Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.