""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.K. are experiencing significant cost-of-living crises. At the same time, he says, businesses 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.""
"Silicon Valley's loudest voices frame AI as a route to more leisure. The world's richest person and the boss of Space X, Tesla and X, Elon Musk has gone as far as predicting work will be completely " optional " and more like a hobby, in as little as 10 years."
High-profile projections foresee automation reducing routine tasks and enabling shorter workweeks, but prevailing economic realities point the other way. Rising cost of living and escalating operating expenses force businesses to control labor costs and extract more productivity from existing hours. Employers cannot afford to pay identical wages for fewer hours, and customer prices cannot absorb higher labor expenses. Time saved by automation is likely to be reassigned to new tasks rather than returned as leisure. A genuine reduction in available work would be required for work to become optional; current conditions favor more work, not less.
Read at Fortune
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