Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, believes that AI will change the face of the work week and increase the lifespan of Americans to 100 years. A larger population of people with more free time is the dream of Silicon Valley’s relentless flow of consumerism and mindless distraction.
Fortune reports that in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon shared his outlook on the future impact of AI on the workforce and society as a whole. Despite being a fierce advocate of long-established career norms such as hard work, preparedness, and in-office presence, Dimon predicts that AI could enable future generations of employees to work just three and a half days a week. He also suggests that Americans in the future could live up to 100 years of age.
Thousands of people at America’s biggest bank are already utilizing AI in various areas, including error detection, trading, research, and hedging. While this may fuel fears of job loss, with Goldman Sachs predicting that approximately 300 million jobs will be lost to the technology and around a quarter of the American workforce fearing they will lose their roles to AI, Dimon points out that societies have grappled with technological advancements before, and AI presents significant opportunities for improving living standards. “Technology has always replaced jobs. Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology, and literally they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week,” Dimon said.
A McKinsey report published last year supports Dimon’s predictions, finding that generative AI and other emerging technologies have the potential to automate 60 percent to 70 percent of employees’ current tasks. This automation could add between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually and enable employees to scale back their working hours.
Dimon and McKinsey are not the first economics leaders to predict that technology will lead to a shorter workweek. In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren’s generation would be working 15-hour weeks due to increased productivity. The current average in Keynes’s UK is 36.4 hours.
While Dimon acknowledges the potential negative aspects of AI, such as its use by bad actors for harmful purposes like cyber warfare, he hopes to see guardrails introduced to the sector. He also recognizes that some employees’ lives will be disrupted by AI displacing their roles but expresses JPMorgan’s commitment to redeploying affected staff to other positions within the company, drawing comparisons with their acquisition of First Republic in May 2023.
“At First Republic we’ve offered jobs to 90% of people. They accepted, but we also told them some of those jobs are transitory. But we hire 30,000 people a year, so we expect to be able to get them a job somewhere local in a different branch or a different function if we can do that. We’ll be doing that with any dislocation that takes place as a result of AI.”
Read more at Fortune here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
