This guy wants you to golf more.
His name is Steve Cohen and he told Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s Squawk Box that in the future we will be spending four days in the office and will have more time for sports (he owns the Mets), golf (he’s invested in courses), and, presumably, hunting humans for sport (he just has that look about him.)
To be clear, he doesn’t actually say that we’ll all be free of the workaday grind. Instead, he suggests that AI will reduce the workload for a certain select people who can afford his golf courses.
“I just think it’s an eventuality. … That’s just going into a theme of more leisure for people, which means golf rounds that go up, interest will go up, [and] I guess courses will be crowded,” he said.
He noted that his traders would definitely be in the office (he runs a hedge fund so he needs to keep making money to support his claims.)
“Forgetting us, I think the vast majority of people will get an opportunity, I think at some point, to have a three-game weekend.”
Look, I’m having a bit of fun with this but when a rich guy tells you your life is going to get better, you’d better look for the axe he’s holding behind his back.
In reality, as creatives, we can expect our lives to get slightly easier. AI-generated content will save us lots of time in researching and understanding content and data We can query an entire book for interesting quotes we can put into our articles – and have the AI understand the concept of “interesting” – thereby reducing the need for reading. We can have the AI write us long paragraphs about boring topics, reducing the need for us to understand those topics intimately. We can use the AI to make music for us – as evidenced by this wonderful rendition of the MIT Software License:
This is all to say that a four day workweek is entirely feasible – for that dude and other dudes like him. For the rest of us, we’ll be tasked with the hard work of using generative tools to make our lives slightly easier but not easy enough that the bosses will let us out of the abattoir slightly earlier. Further, as creators, we need to remember that we must first learn to write, edit, draw, and paint before we can let the AI do it for us. So, yeah, maybe one day we’ll all have a four day workday, Mr. Met, but we’ll probably be filling those days with education, menial labor that the robots can’t do, and despair.
Not golf.
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