Unpopular opinion: The AI era will yield positive outcomes for employment — including shorter weeks, Nobel Prize Laureate and labor economist Christopher Pissarides told Bloomberg. Despite the rapid development of the technology — which raises concerns about potential “dramatic economic and political disruptions” — the labor market will adapt in time to these changes.

Productivity will rise: The uptake of AI could account for a 7% increase in annual global GDP, a Goldman Sachs report has found. Artificial intelligence can replace humans for the “boring things,” allowing people to take care of more compelling tasks, the London School of Economics professor said. This shift can create room for more leisure and many jobs “could move to a four-day week easily” — a welcome development that is backed by research suggesting that shorter working hours are better for mental health.

But there are risks: Despite his optimism, Pissarides has some worries. Although he does not believe that AI coming for our jobs is a necessarily detrimental thing, his focus is more security-oriented with the Nobel laureate citing surveillance and privacy violation as areas of concern.

Social media colloquialisms are revealing truths about the workplace, according to an article published in the Financial Times last week.The covid-19 pandemic, ensuing lockdown, and the drastic changes they have incurred on the way we work, have also changed the way we speak about work. And researchers concur: 65% of employees responded that the epidemic had caused them to reconsider the importance of work in their lives, the article states.

It’s a little bit funny: “Rage applying” is the tendency to submit one’s application to companies en masse as dissatisfaction with work grows. “Sunday scaries” — coined as early as 2009 — is an expression commonly used to describe the dread people experience as the weekend comes to a close and Monday looms ahead.

But also pretty serious: Tongue-in-cheek idioms aside, “the Great Resignation” — an expression invented by academic Anthony Klotz — refers to very palpable realities: Over 50 mn workers in the US alone left their occupations in 2022, the largest figure in more than two decades, the newswire reports. “Quiet quitting” is a term that is generally understood as doing the bare minimum at work, just enough to get by. Some, however, see it as a strict abidance to job descriptions and a refusal to extend beyond the scope of one’s work.

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