Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and one of the greatest fortunes in the world, predicts that the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) will push towards a 3-day work week. Gates sees it as feasible with this technological advance, from which he expects an impact similar to the arrival of the computer, although not as powerful as the industrial revolution.
In an installment of the podcast What Now? by Trevor Noah, the American has stated that the arrival of a three-day work week will be a success for society as a whole, since machines would take care of routine tasks and "producing all the food and things" . Thus, workers would not have to work more than five days a week and would have more free time. "If you come to a society where you only have to work three days a week or something like that, it's probably fine," he said.
Gates, 68, clashes with fears of artificial intelligence that will erase millions of jobs. "If you free up labor, you can help older people better, have smaller classes... The demand for labor to do good things is still there," he added. "The purpose of life is not just to work," he said.
"In the short term, the increase in productivity that you achieve with AI is very interesting," he said. And there may come a day when "humans don't have to work so hard."
Gates already advanced at the beginning of the year that AI has the potential to "change the labor market", and noted that, "in the distant future, we will have to work less than today." "I do not believe that the impact of AI will be as disruptive as that of the industrial revolution, but, without a doubt, it will be as great as the introduction of computers," he now indicates, to pose a simile with word processors, which do not They ended office work but "changed it forever." The workers had to adapt "and they did."
Microsoft focused much of the attention this week with the departure of Sam Altman from OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT in which he owns 49% of the shares. Altman and the company are in favor of promoting the development of artificial intelligence and its large-scale commercialization, leaving somewhat aside the dangers that this technology can pose. The manager has finally returned to the company, amid warnings that he is working on a technology that could be harmful to humanity by reaching the level of human intelligence.
