AN HOUR
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 permanently behind, living with a persistent suspicion that we should be doing a better job of being alive. These are the symptoms rather than the problem.
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
Imagine something takes you three hours to do today and tomorrow, with AI, it takes two. You have saved an hour. Who gets it?
We already describe this as a productivity gain, and of course it is. The same output was produced with less human labour. Another way of saying this is that an hour of a human life is no longer required to do that particular piece of work. This is a more interesting way to think about it, because what happens to the hour?
Currently, the likely answer is that something else takes its place, generally another task. We’ve assumed that technological progress makes us more productive, the time saved is absorbed back into production which allows us to produce more.
I don’t want that to be the inevitable response.
Nearly a century ago, 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 might do with the freedom created when economic necessity occupied less of life.
He had the imagination without the technology. We have the technology without enough imagination.
We are now building machines capable of taking on not only physical work but parts of our thinking work too, and asking, almost immediately, how much more we can produce with them.
What if we picked up the question where Keynes left it? What if the promise of AI were not simply that we could produce more with the same human capacity, but that we could require less of it to produce what we need, and return some of what is released to human life?
Some hours don’t need saving
And what might we do with that returned time? Some of it would go towards parts of life that have no need to become more efficient.
You can’t speed up the hours in which a friend tells you that their relationship is on the rocks. A four-year-old has zero interest in productivity when they are explaining, at extraordinary length, that a snail is moving across the pavement. An elderly parent may tell you the same story you have heard thirty times, and the thirty-first telling is not a situation to be optimised.
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. It means more than technically having free hours. It is the experience of having enough time and, importantly, some authority over it.
Someone can technically have three free hours and experience none of them as theirs. There is always a child that needs ferrying to gymnastics practice, an elderly parent that needs help with the shopping, washing piled up to the stage where ignoring it further becomes a smelly decision. Even work that is technically over can remain incredibly active in your head. An hour released from one obligation has a tendency to be recruited by another.
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. Whether founders or seasoned exec, professionals come to me with entirely different problems but also a version of the same request: how can this all feel slightly less relentless?
Nobody is 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. But with every new capacity that technology acquires, human beings, inconveniently, remain human.
Apparently, even our free time needs a job
Even when an hour really is ours, we seem to have developed a complicated relationship with leaving it alone.
We have become remarkably good at making even the ordinary business of being alive justify itself. Walking becomes a mission to fulfil a step count rather than simply responding to the feeling that a body wants to move. Sleep becomes the optimal number of hours required for “recovery”, presumably because resting sounds dangerously close to indulging ourselves. I’m guilty of all of it. An afternoon off can’t exist without a plan.
Perhaps this is where time and ease part company. More free time doesn't necessarily make life feel less demanding if we immediately give that time another job. So the opportunity 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 surprising 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 irresistible 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 seventeen 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. 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 startlingly 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. Let economies grow. But let human life have a claim on the reward too.
When the machine gives us an hour back, don't automatically fill it. Let the human keep it.