I have a pet theory that it’s not that people are more productive when they work less but that there is less work needs doing but few are willing to say it. You go back in time and a lot of great technological innovations have the inventors talking about how great it will be when we only have to work one day a week thanks to it. All this crazy tech we have nowadays means a lot can be done in less time so more of peoples jobs is just pretending to work or inventing work that needs doing.
It’s about time we reap the fruits of technological progress.
There's difference between employment and actually doing work. A lot of us keep busy with something and get paid for that even. But that doesn't mean that that something holds a lot of value.
We've just seen big silicon valley companies go through the process of shedding 10-20% of their work forces; more in some cases. Seemingly without consequence. Reason: most of those people are busy but not with something that is particularly valuable or productive.
Basically before the industrial revolution, you worked to scrape together a living. Most work was related to food production (farming). The idle were rounded up and put to work typically. The only people not working were the aristocracy. Then the industrial revolution happened and a lot of people started working in factories. Early on this was dangerous and a hard life. It's only with the socialist movements of people rebelling against that things like a five day work week became common. Saturday used to be a working day in most places. Also things like retirement and time off became a thing. And the 40 hour work week.
Basically as worker productivity increased (through automation), less and less people work in food production or anything else that is essential. Since the seventies, we've actually outsourced a lot of production to cheap labor countries. Most of us neither work in production nor food production anymore but in the service industry. Few of us actually even have the skills to produce anything.
The logical conclusion of AI, automation is not idleness. But just busying ourselves with increasingly more frivolous and less essential things for increasingly less time. We'll need to do something with our time. But the value of that is a very loose notion. Having more time to spend basically means there is more money on spending time on each other. Arts, artisanal foods, whatever seems fun/interesting/entertaining.
It’s about time we reap the fruits of technological progress.