These innovations should be used for the benefit of all, not just Big Tech, says Tom Hodgkinson

This week Meta sacked 8,000 workers as part of its promised transformation into an AI-led company (the Metaverse having been long abandoned as a terrible idea).

This seems all wrong. In a sane world, AI would reduce the length of the working week. But this is not a sane world. It’s ruled by something called “shareholder value”, where share price is the only real consideration of a big business. Everything else – employee satisfaction, shorter working hours, autonomy, happiness – comes a long way behind.

AI is seized upon by greedy corporations as a way of reducing headcount and increasing profits, whereas it should really lead to more leisure time for everyone.

We’ve been here before. A favourite essay in the Idler canon is “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell. In this radical attack on the work ethic, written in 1932, Russell wonders why, when presented with new technology, we don’t cut the working day a bit shorter. A four-hour day was what he envisaged. “The road to happiness and prosperity,” he argues, “lies in an organized diminution of work.” Leisure is good, he says, not work, and “with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.”

Russell uses the analogy of a pin factory to demonstrate why this doesn’t happen:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

The only difference here is that the “men” in AI work a lot more than eight hours a day. Last year Sergey Brin of Google told his AI staff that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”. That’s 12 hours a day. Er, Sergey, that was considered to be illegal in the 1840s. That was the decade when, thanks to agitation from female workers in the cotton factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, and in Lancashire in the UK, the working day was reduced from 13 hours to ten.

Like water mills, steam power, electricity and the Internet before it, AI seems inexorably to be leading to bigger profits for the few while the many are cast out into the wilderness. It seems tragic to me that we can’t “distribute leisure justly”, in Bertie’s phrase.

Weirdly, Mark Zuckerberg has put out a statement arguing that Meta’s version of AI, which he calls “personal superintelligence” will let us all spend “more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life”. So far, that hasn’t happened. (If you do want to spend more time on creativity, culture, relationships and enjoying life, it’s easy: just get off Meta platforms.)

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