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Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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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