Back in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that with technological change and improvements in productivity, we’d be working only 15 hours a week in the near future. But while working hours have declined by 26%, most of us still work 42.5 hours a week on average, according to Eurostat figures.
One of the things Keynes underestimated is our desire to compete with our peers — a drive that makes us work more than we need to. “We don’t measure productivity by how many acres we’ve harvested, so the amount of working time becomes an indicator.” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
Due to computerization and globalization in the 1980s, managers could demand more of employees under the threat that jobs could be given to someone else, so the pressure increased. And we took it, overwhelmed with the pressure while shouldering the burden all the same at the cost of our health. Psychologist Barbara Killinger writes such a phenomenon in Workaholics: The Respectable Addicts.
But far from delivering productivity, value, or personal fulfillment, overwork has been proven to lead to burnout, stress, poor health, etc. Nevertheless, we persisted — until the fourth Industrial Revolution came along.
The fourth Industrial Revolution has accelerated the move towards automation and AI, especially for jobs with high physical proximity (接近). Economist Dr. Carl Frey predicts that at least 40% of current jobs will be lost to automation by 2050.
There are exceptions. Jobs that involve complex social interactions are beyond current robot skills, such as teaching, cleaning jobs, and jobs that rely on creativity, according to Frey and Osborne.
According to McKinsey, those whose work falls outside the caring, cleaning and creative fields will still work in the future, just differently. In about 60% of occupations, it’s estimated that a third of the tasks can be automated, meaning substantial changes to the way we work. A large-scale study carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that over the next 20 years, although 7 million jobs will be lost to AI, 7.2 million new ones will be created as a result. So we will work in the future: we just don’t know what we’ll be doing yet.
【小题1】What do the figures in Paragraph 1 mainly indicate?| A．Our working time failed to decrease as much as predicted. |
| B．Technology keeps changing with the development of society. |
| C．Keynes’ prediction mainly focused on productivity improvement. |
| D．Overwork will result in fierce competition between employees. |
| A．People’s false sense of time. |
| B．People’s awareness of peer competition. |
| C．People’s ignoring the quality of their jobs. |
| D．People’s pressure to increase productivity. |
| A．They argued for fairness. |
| B．They devoted more to their work. |
| C．They tried to escape shouldering the burden. |
| D．They emphasized the importance of their health. |
| A．Counseling service will be paid less attention to. |
| B．More and more cleaners become unemployed in cities. |
| C．A majority of teachers will be replaced by robots. |
| D．The types of jobs with high physical proximity will be transformed. |
| A．Worried. | B．Hopeful. | C．Objective. | D．Indifferent. |
