I once knew someone highly praised by co-workers and managers alike, earning decent money doing great work in a core team of a multinational. At some point news came of his firing. Funnily, the first reaction everyone around me had was that of relief. As one of the colleagues later noted, the guy was valiantly solving the problems of his own creation. Once he departed, work became easier.
In a 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russel advocated for 4-hour work days and more leisure time. Almost 100 years later, and we are still nowhere from that goal. Contemporary scholars come with a multitude of reasons why:
- Productivity gains were mostly captured by the capital, not leisure.
- Consumerism used up remaining productivity games.
- Bullshit jobs kept the work ethic in check.
What Eurostat calls ICT is now the source of the artificial complexity that is now burdening the world.
Did you know that 5% of EU's working population or roughtly 10 mln people are now employed in ICT? This is roughly similar to US estimates.
Almost half of these people apparently work in software creation. So where are the European googles and amazons? These 10 mln people for sure have to work on something?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of this work is non-productive.
I've seen an institution spending several years on AI Strategy with the only outcome being several Word documents.
Another institution "banned Deepseek" instead of taking the opportunity to run this open weights model on-site.