Episode 25: A Leisurely AI Workforce

April 24, 2025

The robots are coming to give you more work.

There’s a familiar prediction floating around: AI will replace workers, automate tasks, and shrink the workforce. But if history is any guide, the outcome may be less revolutionary and more… familiar. Past technological shifts promised leisure but delivered longer to-do lists, not shorter ones. As AI streamlines the mundane, it’s likely to open space—not for rest, but for more work. The tools change, but the tempo doesn’t. And if we're honest, we probably won't be sipping mai tais on the beach anytime soon.

My LinkedIn Post

The Early Optimism: Predictions of a Leisure Economy

During the 1950s-1980s, many thinkers speculated that computers and automation would lead to a world of less work and more leisure. Some of the most notable predictions included:

1. John Maynard Keynes (1930s Prediction)

In his famous essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), Keynes predicted that by the year 2000, people would work only 15-hour weeks due to technological progress and automation. He believed that increased productivity would allow workers to meet their needs in a fraction of the time, leading to more leisure.

2. Norbert Wiener (1948 - Cybernetics)

Wiener, the father of cybernetics, saw the potential for automation to replace routine work. He warned, however, that this could lead to unemployment if wealth was not distributed properly.

3. 1960s & 1970s Corporate and Government Reports

Reports from companies like IBM and think tanks such as the Rand Corporation explored a future in which automation and computing would allow workers to focus on creative and strategic tasks while working fewer hours.

4. 1970s U.S. Senate Hearings on Automation

Some policymakers considered a future in which increased productivity would lead to a universal basic income or reduced working hours.

5. 1970s-1980s Futurists and Technologists

Books and articles frequently imagined a world in which computers would handle much of the mundane labor, leading to widespread four-day workweeks or shorter daily hours.

What Actually Happened: The Productivity Paradox

Instead of leading to a reduction in work hours, computers increased efficiency but also increased expectations. This resulted in a higher workload for employees rather than more leisure. The main reasons include:

1. "Efficiency Leads to More Work" (Jeannette Wing, 1990s)

As tasks became easier to complete with computers, companies expected employees to do more in the same amount of time.

Instead of reducing work hours, managers realized they could increase output with fewer workers.

2. The 24/7 Work Cycle (Shoshana Zuboff, 1988)

In In the Age of the Smart Machine, Zuboff examined how computers reshaped work, often blurring the boundaries between work and personal time.

Email, digital communication, and remote work tools made it easier for employers to contact workers outside office hours.

3. The Work-From-Home Illusion (2000s)

Initially seen as a way to increase work-life balance, remote work (facilitated by computers and the internet) often blurred work-life boundaries even further, leading to more hours worked instead of fewer.

4. Cultural and Economic Pressures (2000s-Present)

American work culture places a high value on productivity and long hours, discouraging companies from reducing hours.

Wage stagnation and job insecurity have also contributed to employees working more hours just to maintain their standard of living.

Modern Reflections and Future Trends

The Four-Day Workweek Movement

Some countries and companies are experimenting with shorter workweeks without a reduction in pay, but widespread adoption remains uncertain.

AI and Automation Today

AI and machine learning were initially expected to reduce workloads, but they may instead be making work even more intense (e.g., constant digital monitoring, algorithm-driven performance evaluations).

I posted on LinkedIn recently disputing this whole movement that AI is going to remove in particular developers from their jobs, but I could extend that comment to many jobs.
Right now, there's a movement, of course, in the world of, can we strip employees out of the process and replace it all with AI?
This particular comment that I made was really mostly about, it was specific to developers.
The reason I had even brought it up was that I have been working quite a bit recently with some of the new AI tools that are sort of out for mass market for developers to use.
You know, the Claude's of the world, Cursor, which is a development environment that uses Claude in the background, a number of other things, ChatGPT, of course.
Like, you know, I've been going in on these tools to see what they can do.
And sort of the point of my post in that particular case was really around, well, it can help you, it can help a seasoned developer much better than it can take a novice developer or a wannabe developer and turn them into a super developer.
That's not really where these tools are right now.
But thinking a little bit broader, I have skepticism that this advent of AI is really going to result in a huge reduction or a lack of need for huge chunks of the workforce.
I think we've seen this before in history, or something very similar.
When computers were first being researched and produced and made their way into offices.
So we're talking, I looked up some research and thought leadership on this from the time that I'll link to.
But going as far back as the 30s, 1930s, there were predictions being made around, because at that time there was a huge, you know, manufacturing, you know, an industrial kind of explosion, of course.
And huge advances in technology in that realm.
And the thought at the time was that all this technology will lead us, will lead people to needing to work less.
So they were approaching this from a different angle, the thought, and that sort of train of thought continued into the 50s, 60s, 70s.
And the general idea was, well, if computers, I mean, ultimately it was about computers later down the road.
So if computers can take, can do all this work faster, that's going to enable people to trim back on what they have to do for work.
And they'll be able to just kind of sit around, drink Mai Tais, sit on the beach.
Maybe they work 15 hour weeks.
The umbrella term from this, as I understand it, became the leisure economy.
And the idea was that America would be able to, I think this is mostly about America, America would be able to push its economy forward while people were just able to leisurely sit around and, you know, sounds wonderful, right?
Sleep until 10, do whatever you want for most of the day, maybe put in a couple hours, automate a few things.
Everybody's happy.
What happened instead was that a person could now accomplish what it used to take them, whatever, a week or a day to do.
They could do in an hour.
If you think about, I'll give an example.
If you think about something like a typewriter or something from, you know, when that was the tool of choice.
And I bring this up because my dad, for my whole life, used a typewriter, like an actual mechanical typewriter, to write until he was quite old.
The process of drafting on a typewriter, where you write something up and you have to proofread it manually, and if you make mistakes, you have a choice of either retyping the whole page or whiting out and then typing over that specific spot.
You've got to zero it in on that exact little, you know, space on the page or in an office setting where maybe there's a secretary at the time who would take notes by hand and then type them up and then someone else would proofread them and then they would retype them.
All of that was reduced by the concept of, like, a word processor.
And all of a sudden, what might have used to take a day could be done in an hour or what would take a week could be done in a day.
So, again, you can see where some of these predictions might come up of, well, there's all this extra time.
But instead, as, you know, a true capitalist economy would do, and I'm not saying that's bad or good, it's just – looking back with hindsight, it makes perfect sense.
And instead of it becoming this leisure economy where, well, you know, all this time we've been able to accomplish all this stuff in 40 hours that now we can accomplish in five, you don't get the other 35 back.
Instead, it gets filled up with new stuff, with more stuff.
So, if instead of – if it took a day to, say, you know, take minutes for a meeting and type them up and get them to your boss and now it takes an hour, well, this means you can attend seven more meetings that day and do it seven more times.
And then over the course of the week, if you extrapolate that out, people just were asked to do more because the tools enabled them to do what they were doing faster.
And I think this is exactly what we're going to see with AI.
Right now, again, there's this huge push.
And, of course, it's more cynical than it was, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago where they thought, oh, we'll still all have jobs but we'll sit around and, you know, sit on the beach and sit by the pool or whatever.
I'm not sure why those are my go-to examples today.
You know, now it's more cynical, right?
It's not let's see if we can all have a shorter work week.
It's can we reduce employee headcount?
But it's sort of the same end result in some ways.
The idea being that there's just fewer man hours needed.
And I believe what we're going to see instead is that we still need the same number of hours worked by people in the long run because what we're going to do is find ways to add.
If the job that used to take us a day now takes us an hour and now might take us no time at all.
We'll continue with the, you know, minutes example from a meeting.
If there was one time where you had to go in and write them by hand and transfer into a typewriter, then proofread them, then there was a time where you could get them on a word processor and then after a while you have to proofread them anymore and blah, blah, blah.
And now you've got AI where it can record it for you.
I don't believe that eliminates the person.
I believe what it does is free them up to do something else instead.
And we're going to find ways to just jam pack everyone with even more to do while at the same time running around claiming how much, you know, how much more automated things are.
And both can be true.
It's not that those are mutually exclusive ideas.
We can automate.
I'm sure some jobs will be automated away.
But in terms of the overall need for a workforce and the overall need for people, I don't think that reduces.
If anything, my prediction would be that it increases because if once you automate away all of these smaller tasks, what you're left with is much bigger tasks, things that only people can do.
And maybe those are the things that we get jam packed or our days get jam packed with or, you know, new skill sets that are needed to to be in the workforce.
But once you have them, you have an almost unlimited supply of things to do.
So I don't know, but this just feels eerily similar to me to when there was the advent of computers to begin with and a lot of thought around, well, we don't need as many people hours.
So next time you're talking to somebody and they're talking about how AI is going to get rid of all the jobs, I would pause on that.
I would remember that just because it gets rid of existing tasks or streamlines them in a significant way doesn't mean that all that time is no longer valuable.
All of that time that's freed up likely gets filled with other things, which will then be used to push the world forward.
It's out of the rest of that time, the time that is freed up, where we will see the real push forward in the world.