Technology will lead to a 3.5-day workweek, banking exec says

Live to 100, don’t get cancer, work three-and-a-half days a week — that’s the life Jamie Dimon is predicting for the next generation.

One of the corporate world’s most powerful figures, the JPMorgan Chase CEO waxed optimistic about artificial intelligence technology in a Monday interview with Bloomberg. Dimon admitted that AI would replace jobs, but appeared enthused about the tech’s potential to change work in every part of his company and the wider economy.

Dimon said his bank, which purports to manage $2.6 trillion in assets and employ 240,000 workers, is already using AI for most of its “equity hedging” — where the firm takes two sides of an investment bet to reduce risk, for example by investing in oil alongside solar panels. When Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang asked Dimon if AI would replace jobs, he said, “Of course.”

“People have to take a deep breath,” he continued. “Technology’s always replaced jobs. Your children are gonna live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology. And literally they’ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.”

AI optimists cite the technology’s abilities to dramatically speed up repetitive tasks, write comprehensible English and find useful patterns across swaths of data too large for human comprehension. Interest and investment in the sector boomed this year after the viral release of ChatGPT, the AI-powered language model that can answer user questions and replicate human communication relatively well. 

With his comments Monday, Dimon joins a swath of executives who have posited that AI will dramatically alter the workforce. While some CEOs talk up the need for workers to adjust quickly to stay afloat, others predict that work hours will become shorter and more “human” with AI helping shoulder some load. 

But the transformation of the workforce could deepen income inequality. Some AI systems require what The Verge called “a vast tasker underclass,” underpaid workers who perform tedious and sometimes disturbing work to train the technology. The use of AI for scriptwriting also became a flashpoint in the Hollywood writers’ strike, as the workers pushed for protection against the threat of the tech undermining writers’ credits.

Dimon said JPMorgan Chase is already using forms of AI and gave a shoutout to his team’s lead researcher. He added that if AI replaces jobs at his company, he hopes the firm can “redeploy” the workers.

“For us, every single process — so errors, trading, hedging, research, every app, every database — you’re gonna be applying AI,” he said. “It might be as a copilot, it might be to replace humans.”

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