A four-day work week could become a reality due to the development of artificial intelligence (AI). New technologies are capable of sharply increasing labor productivity, but everything will depend not on the machines themselves, but on human decisions. This opinion was expressed by Ivan Bondarenko, an industrial associate professor at Novosibirsk State University and a researcher at the NSU Laboratory of Applied Digital Technologies.
According to him, there have been technological leaps in history — the loom, the internal combustion engine, the conveyor belt — and each of them increased work efficiency. However, the familiar format of labor — an eight-hour workday and weekends — did not appear on its own, but was the result of historical processes.
Artificial intelligence, the expert believes, creates the prerequisites for a new stage — the transition to a four-day week. But whether this scenario will be realized depends on how society disposes of the freed-up resources: whether they will be used for human development and leisure or for increased workload and profit growth.
The greatest changes, in his estimation, will affect intellectual labor, especially where there are many routine operations.
Accounting and auditing, legal support for typical transactions, translation activities, basic journalism, some programming tasks, customer support, marketing, and design of template materials. Paradoxically, AI primarily affects not "blue-collar" but "white-collar" workers, and this is a serious challenge for the middle class that emerged in the post-industrial economy.
Employers will have to reconsider the organization of labor, the expert believes. In particular, they will need to determine which tasks are more efficiently performed by humans and which by algorithms. Companies will likely also have to invest in retraining employees.
Key skills will include setting tasks for AI, critically evaluating its results, and taking responsibility for final decisions.
