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Furslid comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
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Why are we talking about jobs rather than man-hours worked? Automation reduced man-hours worked. We went from much longer work weeks to 40 hour work weeks as well as raising standards of living.
AI will reduce work time further. If someone can use AI to produce as much in 30 hours as they did in 40, they could chose to work anywhere from 30 - 40 hours and be better off. Many people would chose to work less as they compare the marginal values of free time and extra pay.
Why are we seeing long term unemployment instead of shorter work weeks now? Is this inevitable or is there some structural or institutional problem causing it?
Shorter work weeks didn't just happen. It took a huge amount of effort from unions, which were a lot more powerful then than they are now.
Most jobs don't let you freely trade off how long you work for how much money you get. There are fixed per-employee costs, so businesses would rather have one person working 40 hours per week rather than two people working 20 hours per week. Especially when 40 is the norm and wanting to work less is "lazy".
In the US certain employers are required to provide health insurance for employees who work 40 hours per week or more, but not for employees who work 20 hours per week, so that is at least one incentive that would encourage hiring part-time employees vs full-time employees.
And we've noticed that many of the newly created jobs coming out of the recession are part time; the ones that were lost were full time. This is a reduction in employment-hours, even if it's not a reduction in number of employed people.
"Shorter work weeks didn't just happen. It took a huge amount of effort from unions, which were a lot more powerful then than they are now." I've never understood why people find this story compelling, precisely because of your final clause. If unions were the main force determining hours, why have hours continued to go down now that unions have been drastically weakened?
In the time since the peak power of labor unions, the number of benefits accruing to full-time but not part-time workers has increased, making it more economical to employ part-time workers for a lot of jobs.
(Peak labor union membership in the U.S. was in 1955. This was also the year the AFL and CIO merged, thus removing effective competition in the market for union organizations.)