If AI reduces the working week, fine

August 8, 2025

I can’t think of anything better than a reduction in the working week and an associated Universal Basic Income. People are working much too hard and there are too few people left to care for children, the elderly and the ill. It would be nice to have a world where children are brought up largely by their parents (doesn’t have to be just the mother beyond the breast-feeding stage) and not shoved into before school care at 7.30m and collected at 6pm and then out-of-school-hours care for the entire school holidays.

It would be nice to have elderly parents (who are mobile and not demented) live close by or under the one roof and not shoved into a nursing home at the first opportunity. It would be nice if you were ill and dying to have family members there to hold your hand and not have them rush off to work.

More importantly than all this though, must be the recognition that the world will still turn without an ever-increasing number of humans. There are too many of us; we need to get back to hunter-gatherer numbers. If not that, then maybe a quarter of what we have now.