Experts Said We’d Only Work 15 Hours a Week by 2030. They Were Wrong.
Before the 1980s, we were all but begging the robots to replace us.
Any corporate employee today knows intuitively that the work week is too long. How many times have you been working on a rote or excessively manual task and thought, “this could so easily be automated,” asking yourself why that hasn’t happened yet? If you’ve ever worked in the business world, you have probably spent hundreds of hours of your life that you will never get back entering data into Salesforce or cleaning up formatting in Excel. But future innovation aside, how did we collectively decide that the 9 to 5, 5-days-a-week schedule was a floor rather than a ceiling on our work hours? The truth is, we already have automated so many tasks that are essential to societal function, but it hasn’t spared us any time in the office, as work weeks have only gotten longer.
The narrative that robots taking our jobs is a bad thing is relatively new. Before the 1980s, we were all but begging the robots to replace us. Expert consensus told us that technological advancement should be used to make work more efficient, allowing humans to spend more time on leisure and tasks they actually found interesting. Some were even worried that we wouldn’t know what to do with all our newfound free time, but that…
