For generations, we have been promised that technology would make life easier.
Machines would do the hard work. Computers would do the repetitive work. Automation would make us more productive. And eventually, surely, all that efficiency would mean that human beings would have to work less.
Something strange happened.
The machines became astonishingly efficient. We didn't get the time back.
Instead, we produced more.
Computers allowed one person to do work that once required several. Email made communication instantaneous. Smartphones made us reachable everywhere. Software automated administration. The internet put almost the entirety of human knowledge within seconds of our fingertips.
Yet somehow we remain extraordinarily busy.
Every new technology seems to arrive with the promise that it will save us time. Yet the time saved rarely seems to result in people actually having more time. Instead, technology makes more communication, more monitoring, more documentation, faster responses and greater output possible.
If something that once took a day can now be completed in an hour, we don't generally get the other seven hours back.
We find seven more hours of work to do.
Productivity creates a dividend
Whenever technology allows a human being to produce the same amount in less time, something valuable has been created.
We normally call it a productivity gain.
But perhaps we should think of it as a dividend.
Imagine a new technology allows a workforce to produce exactly what it produced before while working 20% fewer hours.
That 20% has to go somewhere.
It can become more production. It can become higher profits. It can become higher wages. It can allow fewer people to be employed.
Or some of it can be returned to the people whose labour is no longer required.
It can become time.
That is the dividend we rarely seem to pay.
AI makes this question urgent
Artificial intelligence could make this issue much bigger.
AI can already write documents, analyse information, produce computer code, summarise meetings, answer questions, create content and perform administrative tasks in seconds. What it will be capable of ten or twenty years from now is difficult to predict.
Most of the discussion is about productivity and jobs.
But perhaps there is another question we should be asking.
How much human time has this technology saved, and who gets that time?
Imagine AI eventually allows someone to complete their existing workload six hours faster every week.
There are two possible futures.
In one, those six hours are immediately filled with additional tasks, additional targets and higher expectations.
Productivity has increased.
Human life hasn't improved at all.
In the other future, at least some of those six hours are returned to the person whose labour is no longer required.
Perhaps the working week becomes shorter. Perhaps the working day ends earlier. Perhaps people gain more flexibility. Perhaps they simply have enough energy left at the end of the day to live.
The technology is identical.
The difference is who receives its dividend.
We've seen this before
Technology has repeatedly freed us from particular tasks while creating new expectations around us.
Cars gave us extraordinary freedom of movement, but helped create societies in which millions of people cannot function without a car.
Email eliminated the delay of letters, but created an expectation of constant communication.
Smartphones gave us access to almost anyone and anything, but made being completely unreachable increasingly unusual.
Computers made office work vastly faster, yet offices didn't suddenly start closing at lunchtime.
Each technology solved genuine problems. But efficiency has an extraordinary tendency to become more activity rather than more freedom.
Perhaps that isn't inevitable.
Perhaps it is simply a choice we haven't realised we're making.
Time is wealth
There is another reason this matters.
Money is valuable largely because of what it allows us to do with our finite lives.
But underneath money is something even more valuable: time.
An afternoon with your children is time. Looking after an elderly parent is time. Walking somewhere beautiful is time. Learning something simply because it interests you is time.
Growing food, making music, exercising, talking to friends, sitting in the garden, volunteering, sleeping properly or doing absolutely nothing for an hour all consume the same finite resource.
And unlike money, time cannot be saved up and spent later.
Every human being receives a limited amount of it.
Which makes it strange that our measures of technological progress concentrate so heavily on how much more we can produce, rather than how much human life we can release from compulsory work.
A different measure of progress
Perhaps the AI age needs another metric alongside productivity.
Not simply:
How much additional economic output did this technology create?
But:
How many hours of human life did this technology give back?
Imagine if governments, companies and institutions actually measured that.
A technology that allowed society to maintain its standard of living while reducing the average working week from 40 hours to 32 would represent an enormous increase in human freedom, even if we hadn't squeezed every possible penny of additional economic output from it.
A four-day week would no longer simply be discussed as an employee perk.
It could be understood as something much more fundamental:
A technological dividend.
The promise was not more work
There is nothing inherently wrong with productivity, economic growth or technological advancement.
Modern technology has relieved humanity of enormous amounts of suffering and physical labour. Very few of us would genuinely choose to abandon modern medicine, sanitation, electricity, transport or communication.
The mistake is assuming that because technology allows us to do more, we must always do more.
AI gives us an opportunity to reconsider that assumption.
If machines increasingly perform the repetitive intellectual labour that occupies so much of modern working life, we face a choice.
We can use that capability to accelerate everything again.
More output. More emails. More reports. More consumption. More targets. More activity squeezed into every hour.
Or we can decide that at least part of the extraordinary productivity created by technology should finally be returned to the people living alongside it.
Not simply as money.
As time.
Because perhaps the ultimate purpose of technological progress shouldn't be enabling human beings to work ever faster.
Perhaps it should be enabling us to spend a little more of our short lives being human.
Technology has been paying dividends for centuries.
It's time we took some of the payment in time.
