WILL WE WORK IN THE FUTURE?

A job is an important part of how we find happiness in our lives (even if we don’t always enjoy the work). But what if the machines start doing everything for us? HELEN RUSSELL finds out if our working days are numbered

- HELEN RUSSELL

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that with technological change and improvements in productivity, we’d only be working 15 hours a week by now. But while working hours have declined by 26 per cent, most of us still average 42.5 hours a week according to Eurostat figures.

One of the things Keynes underestimated is the human desire to compete with our peers – a drive that makes most of us work more than we need to. “We don’t measure productivity by how many acres we’ve harvested anymore, so the amount of time we spend working becomes a proxy,” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, visiting scholar at Stanford University and author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. “Overwork as a choice, as opposed to slaving away for subsistence wages, has been part of Western society since the Industrial Revolution when some predicted that automation would create an ‘excess’ of leisure time. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.”