Image: A woman watches a snail cross the pavement, neither rushing to be more productive
A short preamble. Over the summer I visited a society that, more than sixty years ago, experienced an extraordinary economic gain. The question for those in charge was not simply how the money would arrive, but what kind of society should arrive with it. The gain came with a question: what was it for?
I returned home to the usual industrial-sized quantity of commentary about AI, what it will replace, whether it’s moving too fast, how productive it will make us, and how many hours it will save.
To me it reads as though the great human ambition, having invented machines capable of saving us enormous amounts of time, is to find more things to do. Which seems a little lacking in imagination. Especially when so many of us already feel overextended and that we should be doing a better job of being alive.
Perhaps this extraordinary gain in machine intelligence should come with the same question: what is it for? What if one answer were a bit less strain, a bit more ease, enough room in the day that life doesn't constantly feel like something you're behind on?
An Hour
One of the things about AI is that something which takes you three hours to do today, tomorrow might takes you two. You have saved an hour. What becomes of that hour?
So far the dominant answer is that something else takes its place, generally another task. Becuase technological progress makes us more productive, we assume that the time saved is absorbed back into production which allows us to produce more.
Does that have to be the only response? In that 1930s British economist John Maynard Keynes imagined a world in which technological progress made society so productive that people might eventually need to work only around 15 hours a week. The question he was already asking was what human beings would do with the freedom that is created when we only needed about 15 hours a week to achieve our economic needs?
His imagination was already running wild with possibility and technological advancement had only just begun. We are now building machines capable of taking on not only the physical work that Keyne’s was observing but parts of our thinking work too, and asking, almost immediately, how much more we can produce with them. Our imaginations don’t seem to be working as quickly.
What if we picked up that observation. What if the promise of AI were that we could produce more with the same human capacity, and that we would require less human capacity to produce what we need, thereby return some of our capacity to living a human life?
Some hours don’t need saving
We could put some of that returned time towards parts of life that definitely don’t need more efficiency. Like the hours in which a friend tells you that their relationship is on the rocks. Or when your four-year-old is explaining, at extraordinary length, that a snail is moving across the pavement. Or when your elderly parent tells you the same story you have heard thirty times, and the thirty-first telling should be absorbed with a new found enthusiasm.
Some of the most important things humans do take exactly as long as they take. Perhaps part of the promise of saving time is simply having more of it for the things that shouldn't be hurried.
But getting an hour back and actually having that hour to give are two different things.
An hour that belongs to you
There is an idea in wellbeing research called time affluence. Which means, having a free hour and the experience of having some authority over it.
Someone can technically have three free hours and experience none of them as theirs. When you are always at the mercy of your kids’ gymnastics practice, or washing piled up to the stage where ignoring it further becomes a smelly decision, an hour released from one obligation has a tendency to be recruited by another. Think about your work that is technically over at 6pm but which remains incredibly active in your head.
There’s the gendered dimension to this too. Women still do a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, so an hour released from paid employment may simply migrate into another form of labour.
We already seem to be stretching human capacity rather far. I have professionals come to me with entirely different problems but also a version of the same request: how can this all feel slightly less relentless?
No-one is coming to me asking to do nothing, that’s not the problem. The problem may be that every increase in what it is possible to do has become an increase in what we expect people to do. And while technology acquires more capacity, we as human beings remain very human.
our free time HAS a job
So when an hour really is ours, we have developed a complicated relationship with leaving it completely free.
The ordinary business of being alive is being permanently justified. Take walking which has become a mission to fulfil a step count rather than simply responding to the feeling that a body wants to move. An afternoon off can’t exist any longer without a plan. I’m guilty of it all.
More free time doesn't necessarily make life feel less demanding if we immediately give that time another job. So the opportunity of the free hour is not simply more time away from work, but more of life free from the demand to be productive at all. Some of that time might achieve absolutely nothing. Which is kind of the point.
Friday afternoons, permanently
None of this will happen simply because technology makes it possible. Technology can release the hour but it cannot decide what the hour is for. Back in the 1930s weekends didn't magically appear when machines became more productive. Neither did paid holidays or the eight-hour working day. Those things required us to develop ideas about what progress should deliver for human beings, and to build our institutions and norms around them.
What technological progress gives us depends partly on the cultural imagination we bring to it.
AI gives us a new opportunity. We can treat every hour it saves as available for more production, or decide that some of the gain should perhaps show up as greater ease.
So we should ask both:
how much more productive can this technology make us?
And what do we want this extraordinary increase in capability to make possible for human life?
For organisations, one answer could be: how much time can this technology return to their people? Imagine measuring not only hours saved, but hours returned. This could look like Friday afternoons off permanently, beyond the summer, at the same pay. Maybe when a machine saves somebody two hours of administrative nonsense, companies can resist the urge to find two new hours of administrative nonsense to put in its place.
Not filling those two hours is itself the gain.
I’m not one to romanticise inefficiency. I am very happy for the machine to have all the wasted hours. If it can find the attachment buried seventy emails down, wonderful. It can take the twenty minutes I would have spent looking for it. The question is what happens after the efficiency has been found.
Businesses need to compete and economies need to function so not every productivity gain can or should become leisure. But does everything we save from work have to become more work? Human life should have a claim on the surplus too.
Which brings me back to Keynes. I don't think his ambitions were too great. I wonder if our imagination for what technology might give back to human beings has become so much smaller than his.
Let AI have the work that never deserved so much of a human life in the first place. Let businesses capture some of the gain. But let human life have a claim on the reward too.
When the machine gives us an hour back, let the human keep it.