has we repeated it quite! The hardness and the very meaning of work are the great absent from the debate on pensions, the dead angle of the government reform repulsive the legal age of departure from 62 to 64 years. Rejected by the unions, still united in the street Tuesday, January 31, this two -year brutal postponement translates well the will of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, to see the French “work more”, the watchword of the second five -year ; But he contradicts the sad experience of men and women living an end of career between unemployment and social assistance, far from employment.
Société Salary and welfare state has been indissolubly linked for almost a century. The funding of pensions is based on an economy where work is central and abundant. Echafauder of breaking scenarios does not fall into the missions of the pension orientation council: its latest projections, published in September 2022, are based on unemployment rate assumptions that France has known in the past fifty years, excluding Any structural dropout of employment by 2050-2070. And if this base were to be undermined by a scarcity of labor under the effect of the latest technological advances?
The question is relaunched by the recent and shattering irruption of artificial intelligence (AI) in daily life. In a world without work (Flammarion, 432 pages, 24 euros), economist Daniel Susskind, professor at Oxford, explores the potential benefits on the use of these dizzying tools, now endowed with cognitive faculties, creative talents and sometimes even of emotional reactions, without being copies of the neural system of the human brain.
The spectrum of job killing machines reappears regularly since the movement of English luddites, at the beginning of the 19th e century, breakers of looms for fear of losing their craft of craftsmen . In 1930, at the start of the great depression, economist John Maynard Keynes already analyzed “technological unemployment”. He then considered it as a necessary evil between two upheavals of the productive system, while predicting that the productivity gains allowed by technical advances would lead a century later to a “age of leisure and abundance”, where we would only work for fifteen hours a week. 2> “Technological unemployment”
The old Malthusian catchphrase that here !, Enjoy opponents of this utopian vision, reinforced by three hundred years of economic history today. Since the 18th century e century, each progress (steam engine, electricity, computer science, etc.) has resulted in the creation of new sectors providing jobs. They led to a division by two working hours in industrialized countries. The number of assets has not stopped growing, including in the most productive countries. “Nothing guarantees that this will happen again in the decades that await us,” says Susskind.
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