AI may reduce human working hours to one day per week: expert

(ECNS) -- Artificial Intelligence (AI) may reduce human working hours to one day per week, said Justin Yifu Lin, dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, on Wednesday at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2023.

With the rise of revolutionary technologies, people will witness greater productivity improvement and more opportunities for one thing, while facing threats to employment and lifestyles for the other thing, said Lin. 

He believes that we could learn from history when responding to such a challenge.

“At the beginning of industrialization, humans worried about being replaced by machines when they found machines could do better than them,” Lin said.

But people need to embrace technological development and progress wholeheartedly because humans progress and living standards improvement are based on the improvement of productivity, he added.

Lin didn’t deny that technological changes would wipe out some jobs or reduce the number of employees, but he believes that will also give people more opportunities to enjoy life.

“In the early days of the industrialization, almost everyone worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week,” he said.

“But in the future, when AI undertakes most work, people may only work one day a week, five hours a day, so we should embrace this opportunity,” he added.