The 20-hour work week we were promised in the 1960s will soon be real. Everything will be more productive. Life will be like Ancient Greece, where we all become philosophers while our digital slaves do the work no one wants to do.
I see that Grok 4 is live. My first impression is that I should immediately switch over to Grok for my software work.
Lift up our nation, our
President and dear FRens
in prayer. 3:15 Eastern.
Do not be wise in your own
eyes; fear the LORD and
shun evil.
Prov. 3:7
Hold still fur a minute! I’m gonna reach over here and throw my reality wet blanket on top of that 20 hour work week notion.
In my school years we had a chance to a study how General Motors made the first move to apply robotics to car production. They built a paper taped computer driven robotic arm and taught it how to paint cars. Their best painter would “wear” the arm, paint the car, the tape would remember how he did it, and from there on the guy only painted new models.
While they then needed fewer painters nobody got to work less. More models, more colors, growing production, kept every body working. As I recall, the ‘56 Chevy was the first machine painted car.
Every production improvement creates new opportunity for new variations. Every time a machine takes a short cut an opportunity to fix it and make it better happens.
Being associated with the firearms bizness for half a century , or so, the opportunities never end. When a maker goes cheap on a part I always see an opportunity to make the better one and customers love it.
One of my favorite example stories is with Henry Rifles. Their first rifle was a lever action 22 which I still have a couple of. They went cheap on the front sight/magazine band and made them out of plastic. Guys started coming into the shop with damaged ones. So I made a steel replacement which another fella started selling on the web. After a few hundred pieces went out, Henry got the word about quality, started making their own metal one, and have never gone back. That was 30 years ago. I quit and let them have it back but this has happened countless times over the last half century.
While some folks might see their job reduced to something a machine can do they will quickly starve if they think they can slide for the rest of the week. They will have to look for that next opportunity——which might very well be an improvement to something they were doing in the old job. Don’t bet your chips on a 20 hour job. It ain’t gonna work that way.