Next Generation Employees Will Work 3.5 Days a Week and Live to 100 Years Old?

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon sees technology vastly improving businesses and the work-life balance of their employees. He sees the working week shrink from five to three and a half days a week. Dimon also predicts that staff in the future could live to 100 years of age.

Thousands of people at America’s biggest bank are already using the technology and artificial intelligence is a “living breathing thing” that will shift over the course of history, according him. The technology may be utilized by JPMorgan for a vast range of areas—errors, trading, research, and hedging to name a few—arguably illustrating fears that AI will take the jobs of human counterparts.

Goldman Sachs predicts that approximately 300 million jobs will be lost to the technology, with around a quarter of the American workforce fearing in the future they will lose their roles to artificial intelligence.

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

But the advance of technology is also something societies have grappled with before, Dimon pointed out, adding that with AI and large language models are also huge opportunities to improve living standards.

Employees could scale back on their working hours, thanks to the technology being used to automate some of their activities, McKinsey found in a report published in 2023. The report also found that generative AI and other emerging technologies have the potential to automate the tasks which take up 60% to 70% of employees’ time at the moment—adding between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy every year.

And while businesses are still grappling with how quickly AI will transform their sector, arguments are already being made to reduce the number of days in the current working week.

A British study of 61 organizations, carried out by the University of Cambridge, saw a 65% reduction in sick days during a four-day working week, while 71% of employees said they had reduced levels of burnout. As a result, 92% of the companies on the program said they’d be keeping a three-day weekend.

Dimon and McKinsey are not the only leaders to predict that technology will lead to a shorter workweek. In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren’s generation would be working 15-hour weeks because of increased productivity. The current average in Keynes’s U.K. is 36.4 hours.

Like many other thought leaders, Dimon is aware that the technology could prove to be a powerful weapon if it fell into the wrong hands. This echoes concerns made by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

Like Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Dimon also says he hopes to see guardrails introduced to the sector, but acknowledged this may take some time to come to fruition because the technology is relatively new.

I believe we are all in transition just like computers which became available to each staff by the 90s. So, we too must embrace AI with guardrails in place.

Reference:

Jamin Dimon says the next generation of employees will work 3.5 days a week and live to 100 years old, Eleanor Pringle, Fortune, 24 November 2024