What will 2045 look like?

[Indistinguishable]

@Chronos

Most of the economic problems with automation stem from the assumption that people want jobs. We don’t. Everyone needs a livelihood, and most people want a vocation, but those are not the same thing. For most of human history, livelihoods have required so much work that the only way you could have time to have a vocation was if you were lucky enough to be able to make your vocation your livelihood. In the automated future, however, it will be possible to make a vocation of writing poetry or whatever, even if you’re not very good at it, because the automation will be taking care of the livelihood.

Right on! And the sooner, the better. But I don’t have much hope of seeing this happen within my lifetime. People have been over-optimistically predicting the arrival of a leisure age for quite some time, and it’s not clear that anything’s fundamentally different now.

[Chronos]

Well, there are people predicting a leisure age, and there are also people who are predicting the End of the World as we Know It from massive unemployment. Those people just don’t realize that they’re both predicting the same thing.

And the leisure age won’t come all at once. In fact, one might argue that nowadays, with our 40-hour workweeks, it’s already started. Most likely, we’ll gradually see a transition to 35-hour or 30-hour workweeks becoming standard, and continuing to taper downwards, with people at every point complaining about how they never do anything but work.