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from HumanProgress.org Education Website
What Ma and Keynes Get Wrong About Progress
Desire for greater material well-being is not a moral failing. Yearning for a better life has driven progress over the past 250 years. British economist John Maynard Keynes once said that “[p}ractical men who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” It’s unclear whether Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma is a Keynes discipline, or considers himself immune to economists’ musings. But in forecasting that technology and automation might deliver a 12-hour working week, Ma certainly echoes Keynesian thinking about economic progress. Sharing a stage with U.S. entrepreneur Elon Musk in Shanghai, Alibaba founder Ma this week predicted that artificial intelligence and automation will deliver unheard of gains to productivity. Offering an upbeat story of its effects, he suggested that producing more with fewer workers will reduce the desirable working time to just “three days a week, four hours a day.” Instead, we will be able to spend extra time enjoying “being human beings” and going to “karaoke in the evening.”
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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