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.
I don’t care what one of the richest people in the world thinks about labour and work/life balance. I care what the average person thinks.
But he’s right about this.
You should, because they are the ones who will be making the decisions.
Until enough of us say that we don’t care what they think, and we demand better.
So unionization?
Yes. That’s certainly one of the best ways.
Unions are tragically toothless when the federal government can just decide a planned strike is illegal.
More unions need to coordinate and actually create threat of a general strike. The UAW ending their contract on May Day and calling for others to do the same actually seems like a pretty good way to leverage power. I don’t think the government can move quick enough to block that kind of collective action.
Biden literally signed an executive order blocking railway workers from striking. If he has that kind of authority and is willing to use it in that way, then all he has to do is make an executive order declaring all strikes illegal. Also, not trying to be a naysayer, but a general strike is a pipe dream. You can barely get people in the same union to cooperate, let alone multiple unions cooperating for a general.
yea! lets hope really hard and politicians might start taking hope as bribes for legislature
And their decisions equate to: how can we employ the fewest number of people with the least benefits and make the most profit off what we’re selling?
But definitely don’t consider that under- or unemployed people don’t have the money to spend on making those profits happen.
Bill Gates isn’t making the decisions anymore and hasn’t been for decades now
He still has more decision making power than anyone I’ve ever met and probably ever will meet.
How fuckin high are you to forget how much power comes from being a billionaire?
wdym? He only gets one vote
/s
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Yeah, every debate about reducing the number of cars always ends at something like “too many jobs are involved in the car industry, so we need to preserve these jobs, and also people need cars to go work in these factories”. I feel like there will hardly be a deep environmental breakthrough if it doesn’t come with a deep social change.
“We’re too deep in the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Just keep digging and hope we eventually come out the other side.” That’s what that logic effectively equates to: doing the same stupid thing and hoping it eventually works out for you.
Companies would automate and save on employees, making people poor. Automation only makes sense if basic universal income is applied
The “””end goal””” would be people working half the time, earning half the money, and stuff costing half as much to make and half as much to purchase.
The issue is we have to force them to translate the manufacturing cost decrease in a price decrease, or it’s never going to happen.
A reduction in work hours is also a step forward until UBI is instated. If I make the same amount doing 4 or even 3 days of work in a week, while automation does the rest, that works for me. The idea is that people need to work less and make the same if not more. UBI or a reduction in work hours are both good paths forward. UBI being the ultimate goal.
If people are that poor they will just deautomate the machines in protest until UBI happens.
People don’t have that kind of power. Especially poor people.
The companies will decide the level of automation
But who will be able to purchase what the machines make?
I don’t care what he thinks, but I care that he has a platform that others in his class listen to and may respect. It’s not a position you hear often from those with a lot of wealth. I’m ok with progress coming from any direction, even if it’s self-serving in some form, and I do think it’s self-serving.
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 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
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’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.
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.
Look at this guy who doesn’t have billions he made from the 90s and 2000s to rely on!
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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.
Some of you [all rich folks] may cry but its a sacrifice I am willing to make
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Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing now
Yeah no shit. The problem is that capitalism hates it.
“Hmmm… Solve world hunger…Why don’t we do that?..”
“Sir, your dinner is ready.”
“The flies were wild caught yes?”
“From Botswana sir. Just as you like.”
Slurp
The Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Denmark are all capitalist societies and run on <5 day work weeks. Capitalism is not the problem, North American society in particular is what seems to have the problem.
We will absolutely have automation but the workers will just be fired and all profits will be absorbed by the stockholder.
No cost savings will be passed on the other consumer either.
The problem is that would be wildly unstable. The capitalist class can’t sell automated-produced goods if people don’t have any money because they’re unemployed.
However, those mass layoffs will make this quarter’s numbers go up, and everything else is a problem for next quarter, which is why they’ll do it.
They’ll milk it until society crumbles putting Bandaids® on problems until revolution.
Once AI and robots can do/make anything they want on demand, they won’t even need money, so don’t need to make money by selling stuff. For sure, they will probably have a tough time transitioning from the idea of making money, but they won’t need to any more. The rest of us could split off our own fairer economy, but they’ll probably have the IP locked up on all the technology so we can’t use it and have to keep working 5 day or more weeks.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
Also, What mind bending drugs are you on? Healthcare is riddled with examples of denied insurance claims for treatments.
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
I think it’s unavoidable that humans won’t have enough work in the future since more and more stuff get automated.
I also think the evil people at the top knows this and are no strangers to starting wars to get rid of millions of people, when there is no capitalistic benefit for them to exist.
Their goal isn’t to get rid of people. It’s to have more people. That’s why abortion band and stuff are pushed. More people in this system means more people trading their lives to give profit to the owners. Unless there’s an actual threat of revolution, more people is useful to them.
Yeah but my point is, more people may not mean more profits in the future. Depends on what can be automated.
So basically im saying there are two ways to increase profits, either reduce costs (salaries) or increase sales. It’s possible that in the future, the equation becomes that it’s possible to reduce costs very very much by reducing employees to almost nothing, but someone needs to buy the products for it to be a profit, I agree.
It just seems so primitive what we are doing now. We should build societies where humans are happy, but capitalism is the opposite, and other systems seem to suck also.
Those star trek societies are only possible because they can generate items from thin air…
The “other systems” historically have been sabotaged. For example, Cuba had basically no ability to trade externally because the US wanted them destroyed. They’ve been fairly successful despite this though.
For another example, the Guatemala coup occurred when a new democracy formed and elected a leftist who destributed land to the poor and implemented a minimum wage. The United Fruit Company (Chiquita now) was using the land and cheap labor for their banana empire, so they lobbied to have the US overthrow them. They did, and Guatemala ended up with a dictatorship, which also genocided the natives while the US did nothing to stop them.
There are plenty of other options. Capitalists are just scared of them, so they push the myth they always fail. Instead they fail because they kill them.
Yeah it makes sense. They want to protect what they have built now, all based on interest rates and everyone borrowing money they have to pay back their entire lives by working.
And more competitions for resources. Which means the owners of those resources (landlords, corporations) can drive up the prices. Kill off all the poors and then there’s no demand to rent your apartments or buy your shit. No demand drives prices down and therefore profit down.
I wonder what happens when the work is done and all jobs are successfully automated away. It makes very little sense how a stable world could exist where 10 guys own EVERYTHING.
Crap, now all the braindead covid conspiracy theorists are going to roll this into their “15 minite cities are open air prisons” conspiracies
I mean…isn’t your pattern recognition starting to ring a little bit?
No.
Because I’m not under the self-important delusion that everything is part of a grand conspiracy out to get me.
It doesn’t ever matter to you people how obvious it becomes over time. Like three years ago when a ridiculous number of people seemed to beleive the policies then wouldn’t result in the reality now, no matter how hard we tried to tell you.
I have learned over the years that reasoned discussion is impossible at this point. You are firmly fixed on your opinions, and I am moderately fixed with mine, and the gulf in between is large.
So I will simply bid you good day.
I’ve not stated an opinion or theory. I asked if you can think.
you sure can’t
that’s almost clever, how long that take you to conceive?
which policies?? You just gonna shit out an example that is generic as fuck and doesn’t actually shed any light on the bs you’re trying to push?
How the hell is a 3day work week result in open air prisons??? You have to back this absurd claim up or literally everything else you say is fucking bullshit.
The fuck are you even talking about?
Literally what bro
Pattern recognition, do you have it?
I’m recognizing a pattern in your comments all right
Is it irritation?
Honestly it’w been a couple days, kinda forgot. Happy Thanksgiving.
My pattern recognition tells me there are faces in clouds too, should i believe in cloud giants?
Yes you should, that’s totally the same thing as recognizing trends over time.
You skipped class on the “correlation does not mean causation” day didn’t you?
People who believe in this insane shit shouldn’t be allowed to vote… in fact, should be in literal prisons, as they’re a danger to themselves and society.
So, you don’t believe in voting as a human right, and you think prisons have ever solved even a single solitary thing in their entire history?
Miss me with that lmao
Cultural conservatives (including many leftists) believe that social liberals are a danger to themselves. That’s not a precedent that you want to start.
I didn’t name a conspiracy theory. I asked if you had pattern recognition. It would seem not.
Walkable cities would be an absolute hellhole, but not for the reasons that conspiracy theorists are claiming. Packing everyone in densely enough to make everything walkable will be a hellhole.
We need affordable options for transportation. Bad weather and the cold also require enclosed vehicles that can’t tip over.
Packing everyone in densely enough to make everything walkable will be a hellhole
Have you ever heard of the concept of “cities”? Everything important is within walking distance in the capital of my country and if not there is great public transport.
I’m sure they’re aware. Hell is other people.
We used to have walkability. It was actually better than the car infested hellhole we are it right now.
Walkable cities exist. They’re quite nice.
A lot of words to to express “I’m an American who doesn’t even have a passport.”
Can’t even imagine a walkable city, and talking about it like it’s a far-off sci-fi concept, rather than a lot of peoples’ actual everyday life. Yikes.
The term walkable includes public transportation. It’s a multiplier on what locations are considered accessible without owning a car. Common misconception.
Sounds great. Only question is how we get paid well enough to live. A question which went conveniently unasked and unanswered.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a skilled job for me that ought to be paid then
The point is salaried workers generally would make less.
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.
Bill Gates supports higher capital gains taxes as well as EITC which is a form of Negative Income Tax, and in his hypothetical we’re going to need a lot of engineers and mechanics to make it work. He also says a UBI could work if automation production increases in the coming decade or so, but he doesn’t currently support it.
You might think “OH BUT EITC DOESNT REALLY HELP THE POOR BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO HOLD A JOB” but the thing is for businesses to stay open more than 3 days a week they would need to start hiring more people for less hours per week.
okay I’ll take it. Bill is one of the few that’s actually thinking things through at least.
machines will make money for us too, everyone gets a magic money machine
Caveat: I am not a communist. At best, I could be categorized as a “libertarian market socialist”.
Cruelty of “hustle” or “work culture” is an imperative for the parasitic ownership class precisely because it ensures the working classes do not have the free time to collectively bargain.
A 3-day work week is antithetical to keeping the proletariat under the boot heel of wage slavery.
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?
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.
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.
As an end goal, with something like UBI and rescaled salaries etc … yes, this obviously true.
The catch is that there’d be a transition period, with uncertainties and states of incomplete capacity either from the AI or the implementation of the rearrangements of salaries etc.
In that phase, there will be opportunities for people or companies to acquire power and wealth over this new future. Who will make and sell the AIs? Who will decide what gets automated and how and with what supervision. That’s where the danger lies. It’s a whole new field of power to grab.
that’s not a problem because I plan on rising to power soon and will not let that happen
Woah there LeroyJenkins, we don’t need you rushing in too soon now
We need to have a plan in place first
oh my God he just ran in…
God dammit leroy
Nah, Bill said where the machines make the food. So, we’re good. Least we got chicken.
I disagree, I vote for Leroy Jenkins to have all the power! All hail our new randomly selected overlord! 😁
How in the world did Bill Gates go from being a scummy unethical monopolistic figure to now some trusted guru on everything? I need an explanation.
He used the money from the former to launder his image
Money = Infinity Stone
24hr news furnace is hungry for bs and Business Insider is here to service it
Lots of PR. I just listened to a QAnonAnonymous podcast episode on him and learned that the foundation isn’t as charitable as it seems. There are many reports that they come in and try to control the charity/project requesting funds, force these groups to give licensing rights to their technology, and often rely on public funds to get their projects off the ground. They likened it to the old Microsoft days where they come in and absorb companies with hostile takeovers.
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
When someone says technology will make your work easier, they’re looking for an excuse to make you work harder.
Or replace you.
Or force everyone to work part time, and drop benefits…
Farmers would disagree
Yes, but farmers also need to know how a CLI works and how to solder microcontrollers in order to get their machines working without forking over their firstborn to John Deere
He’s ok with it as long as the machines are all running Windows, and he gets his fair share.
I don’t think ol’ Billy cares much about Windows anymore, I’ll be honest.
Given that he has flirted heavily with Samsung as of recently.
