Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Invoice Gates, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk have all made the identical prediction lately: The workweek is about to shrink. Automation will take over routine duties, they argue, liberating employees’ time and pushing a four-day work week towards changing into customary. Gates has even floated the concept of a two-day workweek.
However Mark Dixon, CEO and founding father of Worldwide Office Group (IWG) CEO isn’t shopping for it. From his vantage level, working the world’s largest versatile workplace supplier—with greater than 8 million customers throughout 122 nations and 85% of the Fortune 500 amongst its clients—the maths doesn’t add up.
“Everyone is focused on productivity, so no time soon,” Dixon says flatly.
“It’s about the cost of labor,” Dixon explains to Fortune. The U.S. and U.Ok. are experiencing vital cost-of-living crises. On the identical time, he says, companies are experiencing a “cost of operating crisis.”
“Everyone’s having to control their labor costs because all costs have gone up so much, and you can’t get any more money from customers, so therefore you have to get more out of people.”
Primarily, corporations can’t afford to pay the identical wages for fewer hours, and so they can’t go the distinction on to clients. So any time ‘freed’ by automation is way extra more likely to be stuffed with new duties than handed again to employees.
Elon Musk says work might be non-compulsory sooner or later—however this CEO says AI might create extra work, not much less
Silicon Valley’s loudest voices body AI as a path to extra leisure. The world’s richest particular person and the boss of House X, Tesla and X, Elon Musk has gone so far as predicting work might be utterly “optional” and extra like a passion, in as little as 10 years.
In actuality, Dixon means that this situation would solely occur if there’s not sufficient work to go round, moderately than bosses abruptly changing into benevolent. However in his eyes, AI will most certainly create extra—not much less—work.
Each main technological shift, he argues, has adopted an analogous arc: concern of displacement, adopted by an enlargement of alternative.
“AI will speed up companies’ development, so there’ll be more work, it’ll just be different work,” he says.
In Nineteenth-century Britain, Dixon remembers English textile employees protesting towards new automated equipment, fearing it threatened their livelihoods, lowered wages, and de-skilled their craft throughout the Industrial Revolution. They had been referred to as Luddites.
“They went around the country smashing up the looms to stop progress. But look, in the end, you’ve heard of the Industrial Revolution. That’s what came from those looms and factory production.” As mass manufacturing made items extra out there, retail grew; extra managers had been wanted to supervise the machines; the center class grew, and so forth.
Likewise, there was an analogous palpable concern when computer systems first burst on the scene within the Eighties. The 1996 guide Ladies and Computer systems detailed folks fearing changing into “a slave” to machines and feeling aggressive in direction of computer systems.”
However for the reason that explosion of the PC (after which the web, the Cloud, social media, and so forth), most professions have undergone a digital rebrand—as an alternative of disappearing altogether.
Copywriters now use laptops as an alternative of typewriters; designers depend on Adobe Photoshop as an alternative of pen and paper; and a plethora of IT roles had been created alongside the best way.
“It’s impossible to stop progress,” Dixon concludes.
“Companies have to do what companies have to do, and it’s really important for young people coming into the marketplace to work a little bit harder on really selecting the right jobs, the right avenue, getting extra skills in things like AI. Whatever job you’re going to do, you’ve got to be good at tech.”
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
