It does? Standard of living increases in the last 300 years have made leisure time more accessible to more people than ever.
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.
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.
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).
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.
If so, hook a brother up with an interview…
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.