Even within my own lifetime it seems like people have less free time than ever, so I’m skeptical.

Both my grandparents raised 3 kids on a single salary and owned their own homes by thirty. One of them did this in a communist country!

They never had laptops so the work finished at 5 and that was it. Ditto for weekends. I work longer hours and could never dream of doing what they did with two salaries.

The book Capital in the 21st Century shows that the phenomenon you're talking about with your grandparents is a historical aberration caused by World War 2 and is unlikely to be repeated again unless there's another destructive war.

World War 2 destroyed wealth, it did not create it. These are policy choices.

Once you hit rock bottom the only way to go is up, hence creation of wealth for many Americans and destruction of it for many Europeans. Policy choices don't exist in a vacuum and are instead beholden to the conditions of the world, one of which being, it's very easy to build up when everything around you is flattened.

The grandparent who lived in the communist country that war flattened when he was a teen had 3 kids and a house on a single income 10 years later.

Me who lived in a country where war hadn’t touched its shores for centuries was unable to achieve that.

It isn’t about building up. The wealth is already here, in far greater quantities than existed in a recently war torn communist country.

And before that? As I said, your grandparents are an anomaly. You are regressing to the historical mean. Policy can control some of it but black swan events like world wars do occur.

Yeah but also despite being the richest we've ever been on avg., somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.

But more to the point, it seems that 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value from all knowledge work ever, despite doing it off the backs of artists, programmers, writers etc.

(Assuming they don't collapse the financial system , internet or power grids first).

> somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.

Working more is a choice. The field is well paid because there the industry is supply constrained. Workers have a choice to work more because they're the supply.

> 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value

The AI companies running models will capture a portion of the value they're creating. Their vendors and their customers capture similar portions, and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.

Really? You can tell you employer you want to work 4 days a week only?

If so, hook a brother up with an interview…

Yes, I have done this and more. Grab your nuts and say what you want, with your chest.

>and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.

This is a fallacy where you extrapolate the large change in a single dimension and imagine everything else staying mostly the same, ignoring the disruption of the system from non-linear effects of that single dimension being saturated. When a few companies capture a large proportion of the economic value of the system, the economy simply doesn't exist as it is currently conceived.

The current economy is driven by the need for broad participation to maintain the collective standard of living. We all get to skim a bit of that value for ourselves, and so distribution is inherent to the system. When broad labor participation is no longer needed to create collective wealth, the leverage of the average person to demand a share of the value produced evaporates. The economy in this scenario is something very different. There's no reason to imagine wealth being distributed in an egalitarian way; it certainly won't be automatic.

Your AI psychosis is showing

This guy was talking about airstriking data centers. People of his kind are the reason humanity will never reach the stars. Ludditism is a civilizational threat that must be countered by any means possible.

What about last 10 or 20 years?