AI will not give you Fridays off
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote one of the most optimistic predictions in the history of economics. Thanks to technology and rising productivity, he argued, future generations would work no more than 15 hours a week. They would have so much leisure time they would barely know what to do with it. Keynes was one of the most brilliant economic minds of the twentieth century. He was also spectacularly wrong on this question. In 1950, Americans averaged 38 hours a week. Today, we average 34. Nearly a century of technological progress, from electrification to the PC to the internet to the cloud, moved the needle by four hours.