People keep saying how the rise of AI technology will improve production efficiency, which can ease the burden of employees, thereby improve their work life, e.g., work less hours, take on more meaningful roles, better work-life balance, etc. I've even hear some people saying naive things like, “Don't worry, we'll switch to universal basic income once AI takes over every job.” lol my sweet, sweet summer child. The sad reality is, at best, we stay relatively the same; at worst, more people lose their jobs.
Let's take manufacturing for example. In the past, you need, say, 100 workers to produce 100 pairs of shoes each day solely by hands if they work 8 hours a day. And then later on, with the invention of machines to automate certain parts of the process, the same number of workers now only need to work 5 hours a day to produce the same number of shoes. But obviously, that didn't happen. Instead, employers capitalise on the advantage of machines to increase the production rate even further. So they maintain the same 8-hour working time and now produce 160 pairs of shoes each day. And with every improvement in the process, the production rate increases, but employee benefits rarely, if ever, get better. Factory jobs nowadays still require workers to work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Yes, wages do increase, but that's just to keep up with the inflation. Their buying power is still the same.
The same concept can be applied to any other jobs that can be automated via a machine/device like cashiers, manufacturing jobs, agricultural jobs, etc. Workers are either reduced to save cost or forced to maintain the status quo to improve the production rates.
If machines didn't improve our current work life better, I don't think the application of AI technology will benefit the working class in any meaningful way. Because greedy corporations will obviously try to take advantage of the AI technology to increase their profits. And you might argue that new jobs like some sort of AI robot technicians will be created and demands for AI-related jobs will increase. But the number of new jobs will never keep up with the number of jobs replaced. For example, if I replace 10 cashiers with 10 self-checkout machines, I probably only need to hire 1 technician to perform monthly maintenance and the occasional repairs. And software is even worse, because the same software can be replicated without cost and sold to multiple businesses used to replace their employees, and only several software engineers are required to maintain the systems and perform debugging and such.
So looking at the big picture, no doubt the rise of AI technology can improve a lot of things. But I can hardly imagine how it will improve our work lives. Because we live in a world where you need money to survive, and the only reliable way of earning money is through jobs. As long as we live in a capitalist society where the exchange of goods and/or services is performed through money, we will never achieve the true freedom we dream of. Because billionaires will never give up their luxurious lives in exchange for the wellbeing of everyone else.