This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.
In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.
More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.
The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.
I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.
while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average
They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.
And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal decrease. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.
The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.
Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.
Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit.
One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.
If it was utilization of fixed capital that motivated the maximum-length workweek of today and centuries past, they wouldn't mind who was on the shifts or how many so long as there were three of them.
I'd be surprised if the jobs where it highly matters which employer covers the shift weren't significantly outnumbered by the ones where it generally doesn't. Labor-as-a-commodity has been an explicit goal of a lot of industrialization management methods.
I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.
> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.
Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.
I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.
You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
Wouldn't the parent's post mean that you bring profit to the company, but you're worth less than the full amount of that profit because, should you demand to be paid more, you can be replaced by someone who won't demand more.
(Has there actually been a lot of terminations in the US tech industry, or is that an odd biasing mechanism causing me to see such things as bigger than they are?)
Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed.
So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.
That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
> Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that
"problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
I like FSI, which is a dimensionless number taking into account basically the functioning of society and the likelihood for unrest. (Fragile State Index)
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.
People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things
Yes, it's quite sad that when big tech leadership talks positively about China they really like the exploitive labor practices that the country exhibits.
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
You can lobby Congress to do things, even better you can volunteer at campaigns and try to elect people to Congress that want to do these things.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
Benefits for extra productivity filter up to the shareholders not to the workers producing the extra productivity.
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
I work 3 days one week, 4 days the next week. Never more than 3 days in a row. It's 12 hour shifts, which sucked at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. The free time is amazing. I took 2 days vacation this week and ended up with 9 days off in a row because of the holiday.
I don't want to get too specific, but I'm a supervisor at a factory. Food stuff.
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
Oh it totally is for some people. I don't have or want kids so that's not an issue for me. Scheduling things with friends isn't usually too hard, just have to be more intentional about it/schedule in advance. I like having days off during the week to get errands done when most other people are at work. And if I do need a weekend off that's usually fine because I accrue enough vacation hours where I usually end up selling back or rolling some over into the next year.
I did it for a summer in University and I didn't have to work night shifts, it was amazing to be honest I would do it again if I never had to work nights.
"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It also gave my mind time to process issues in the background. When I had an ah-ha moment during my time off, I could note it down, and when I showed up on a work day, I was able to solve some of those problems I wasn't able to solve in the moment. It was a great system.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
> During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep.
This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.
I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.
Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.
the four day work week has been trialed many times and already would have been the same or higher productivity before agents, honestly. if agents get really good let's just go to 3?
Different countries are going to distribute the benefits of automation in different ways. Northern European states will pursue shortened work weeks and lavish social services. China will reinvest the productivity gains into its industrial capacity. The United States will have five trillionaires.
Top professionals whose comp is tied to performance didn't work 40hr 9-5s in the first place - but their comp is tied to performance, so when they have 10x the output they are compensated accordingly
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
What Star Trek doesn't show is how they got there. I promise you it's going to be extremely painful, but once we're on the other side it'll be worth it.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
We are very well past the point where technology could allow post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
Yes, dropping consumption would immediately allow us to work 2-3 days a week.
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
Not until aliens land and show us the way. I firmly believe we aren’t presently capable of allowing a post-scarcity economy to exist — too much stuff is based on scarcity. So much so that we create scarcity instead of giving away excess. I’m thinking of food specifically.
If "stuff" === power over other people, then agree 100%.
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
As someone who negotiated 4 day weeks since early 2020 its been awesome. I get chores and yard work done and more family time every week. Wish it was standard.
I agree with the premise of time away being easier. I don’t think the models/harnesses are there yet. There’s still a good amount of human input required to generate quality work.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
On a tangent if you’re paying $6000 a month for your three children for childcare you are better off getting a Nanny for significantly lesser than that
This is certainly a fun exercise in economics. By taking a shortened work-week, should the companies then pay us 80% of our current comp? Or maybe a little less since they will have to pay for the added tokens we are now using as part of our job that we used to do manually (i.e. time)? Or perhaps we are able to justify that now they can save overhead by reducing facilities costs by 20% as well. Oh but maybe their business lease has a continuous occupancy clause and now the reduction in foot traffic causes them to get penalized so they need to reduce our salaries even more. Slippery slope my friend.
No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
Exactly. In the four days that you worked you produced 40 days of output, so you should get 40x the pay. It would be unreasonable for the company to pay you 50x what you were getting before... they do have shareholders to think about after all.
I have a similar wacky plan I like to call "Delete Thursday". Four day work week, and more weekends a year just by having six days a week instead of seven.
I was very happy working extra (I won't call them long) hours when I first learned about computing. A bit later on when I started working for financial entities I felt a bit different - the work was interesting, but I just wasn't prepared to sacrifice my time. And if we can have the day off, I think that can only be to the good.
I get where the writer is coming from, but it misses one very important point.
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.
Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.
I'm fairly certain a lot of people do this. They don't literally take a day off, but just work fewer hours or less hard. And this makes sense, there is a strong incentive to not give away all the productivity gains to your employer.
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".
sadly life quality is not the thing that the competitive system is maximizing for, and thats one of the article's points. we compete to our own detriment, but to not compete is to become extinct
Good source for what? I'm just trying to point to a concept, an idea. There's no "facts" here, just speculation. If you disagree with the point there, why don't you just say what you think is true instead, I'm happy to discuss the ways in which the article is wrong
unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less",
> We already did draw the line and we can redraw it. We drew the line very strongly at 40 hours, 4 days a week. That is the "official" expected hours for most salaried employees.
because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others.
> This already happens. People making salary, 40 hours, that work 50, 60, etc. to get ahead of their coworkers in a career sense. Or people taking optional overtime to get ahead financially or people who work hourly working extra hours or people who have 2+ jobs or a side hustle.
even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
> Didn't realize Japan is imminently going to conquer the US because they work more hours.
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
> It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Yeah but the transition is rough. For example when we have autonomous vehicles what are all those drivers going to do. You might saw "tough luck" but we are a society not just an economy.
> All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone.
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Everything you say is correct but it comes with a massive decrease in quality of life for the average person. Food will be 5x the cost, with less variety. Nobody wants to till the land anymore. Just like people 100 years ago didn't want to be hunters.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
How are neither of them being driven by capitalism?
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
Capitalism is certainly one lever, but were we a communist country, I would still be afraid of the same thing. Centralization of power and ideology driving technological progress is in essence what I think we should all worry about.
The best way to take advantage right now is to consult. Take some time off and just do a little on the side. Then again the job market could collapse, so maybe keep your job?
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
> every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time, and certainly not in a way that's proportional to the gains of automation. Instead, companies will expect still more productivity. Why give you more time off if they can keep workdays fixed and add still more productivity? Certainly, the competition will do it.
Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
Workers need to have more leverage for them to be able to independently assert their working hours. People with such luxury become contractors or proprietors.
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
1 And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said unto Pharaoh: 'Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.'2 And Pharaoh said: 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
Sorry, I'd rather have a higher quality of living for most people (as evidenced by any huge development in technology) rather than humanity stagnating. This post is quite myopic.
I'm deadly certain that routing more of society into producing SaaS webapp shovelware (and the infrastructure to support it) is not in fact going to improve quality of life, and will in fact cause us to stagnate.
i really dislike lazy bums. you are in a position to use great tools for productivity and you're not inspired to work harder? you should be fired on the spot.
indeed those who engage in the capitalistic system without devoting the entirety of their soul to generation of profit, they are subhuman and therefore deserve to be subservient. true humanity is found in embodying our animal nature and maximizing the influence of individual genetics - money is a mere vehicle to express the totality of the human spirit. those lacking money clearly lack spirit and should be considered beneath humanity, effectively equivalent to livestock. baa baa black sheep, give me every last thread of your wool or be exiled
This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.
I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.
In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.
Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.
More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
Shareholders = society. The rest of us are just the help
Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.
The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.
I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.
while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average
They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
That's not really true. Pay raises have lagged behind productivity gains for decades now and the gap is only growing wider.
is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.
There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.
"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
typically there is a floor, at least de facto.
The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling.
Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work
At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time.
As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?
> Can’t we demand a piece of this?
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.
I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.
And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal decrease. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.
Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn.
But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.
The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man
When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things:
1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy
Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
> and increasing time available for economic consumption?
Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.
The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly:
You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
Might have been possible before mass migration flooded the market with cheap labor and jobs connected to one employer and immigration status.
Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.
We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.
Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.
Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.
So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.
This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.
If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.
Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.
(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the conditions around it were while people noticed that those new expectations and conditions didn't actually seem necessary for their survival (or even much to their personal direct benefit vs the benefit of business owners).
Any technology that lets more be done with less time is an opportunity for a population to make an attempt to claim some of those gains for themselves.
The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.
Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.
Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?
The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.
This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.
The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.
Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.
Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.
If it was utilization of fixed capital that motivated the maximum-length workweek of today and centuries past, they wouldn't mind who was on the shifts or how many so long as there were three of them.
I'd be surprised if the jobs where it highly matters which employer covers the shift weren't significantly outnumbered by the ones where it generally doesn't. Labor-as-a-commodity has been an explicit goal of a lot of industrialization management methods.
I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.
We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).
The drivers behind the asymptotic scaling are the tasks that can't be compartmentalized into prompts, the same tasks that couldn't be compartmentalized into a request for another person to do.
> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.
Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)
just don't call it organized labor.
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.
That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
<insert required disclaimer here that fiduciary duty does not require using every opportunity to increase shareholder value>
Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.
> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.
I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.
Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.
You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.
Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.
Were you among them? Has that changed?
something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
> in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.
Wouldn't the parent's post mean that you bring profit to the company, but you're worth less than the full amount of that profit because, should you demand to be paid more, you can be replaced by someone who won't demand more.
(Has there actually been a lot of terminations in the US tech industry, or is that an odd biasing mechanism causing me to see such things as bigger than they are?)
Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed.
So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
Sounds like an argument for organised labour to me!
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us?
More flour more water. More water more flour.
I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.
AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.
well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.
That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.
Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse.
Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
> Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that "problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
oh no an anecdote! run away!
You should, especially when said anecdote amounts to "shut the fuck up and be thankful to your corporate overlords peasant."
> i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?
I like FSI, which is a dimensionless number taking into account basically the functioning of society and the likelihood for unrest. (Fragile State Index)
It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.
What is the relevance of "Americans standings" circa 1986?
The measure was clearly stated: the life style of that one guy's dad. He's the official consumer well being canary.
Things are better for you than your dad, presumably. Unfortunately, many Americans still live like that, so the conclusion doesn't hold water.
That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.
Are you sure?
From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006.
e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility.
To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population.
Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.
Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
Yes actually, this is remarkably well studied:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
Plane travel is a very poor proxy for quality of life.
Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
Huh?
People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc…
I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
Wow. Yes.
It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".
My dad was a stock broker in the late 1970s and remembers when most of trading was 100% manual and firms actually had "runners" who would take stock certificates back and forth between trading firms.
He has this great quote about when computers came out:
"We were told 'computers will save you so much time on work tasks that you won't even know what to do with your free time'. I spent the next 30 years working the same number of hours. "
Human had all the industrialization and stuff, yet we work 5 days / week now.
People waited around a lot before, and since the baseline speed for everything was slower, no one had an edge. Now everything is fast and instantaneous and that’s available to everyone. It’s part of the reason why our lives are so stressful now. I remember my parents working and their work had significantly less stress on a day-to-day basis. Everything was at a nice relaxed human pace. They would be responsible for one excel sheet worth of work per week, which we can now do in an hour or two.
People work 5 days a week because of protracted violent strikes by unions and socialist revolutionaries forcing governments to recognize labor rights. Prior to that the norm was working 7 days a week, sunup to sundown, with only Christmas off, from adolescence until you died.
SEs would rather play many player versions of the prisoner's dilemma than unionize.
You're right. We need to bring back protracted violent strikes by unions and socialists!
You know the ones bringing most of the violence were the state and private goons hired by capitalists, right?
Because human nature it to want more, more than wanting idleness.
"Because executive and shareholder nature is to want more, more than wanting idleness."
I fixed it for you.
That's also true, inclusively.
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
Alright guys, I'm running for president. 4 day work weeks (8 hours each) for employees or prison.
You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/business/iceland-shorter-work...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...
What do you mean? You just need to ban companies from doing 5 days work.
Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
This is all powered by norms.
By this logic you could get promoted if you worked six day work weeks.
Have you not seen people who work longer and harder get more promotions? That has been my experience.
Right, so if it's happening already, nothing is going to change. Four days a week it is!
And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things
There's a reason 996 culture is seeping into American startups. Whether it actually makes them more productive in the market remains to be seen.
Yes, it's quite sad that when big tech leadership talks positively about China they really like the exploitive labor practices that the country exhibits.
If only there were some kind of third party we could all collectively agree to delegate enforcement of cooperation to...
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
You can lobby Congress to do things, even better you can volunteer at campaigns and try to elect people to Congress that want to do these things.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
Benefits for extra productivity filter up to the shareholders not to the workers producing the extra productivity.
This reminds me of the Luddite movement in England. Industrial machines were disrupting the textile industry. The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
As we know their movement was not successful giving rise to the bleak images of industrial factory life in England. I think all that will happen is workers will expect to be more productive than before but their skills will be less compensated because “the machine” did most of the work.
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-t...
> The Luddites were not anti technology they were against technology allowing employers to suppress wages and working conditions and for increasing the quality of life and more humane working conditions for the extra productivity.
I’m seeing this talking point circulated a lot recently but it’s not really the whole story. Luddites weren’t on a selfless crusade to steal from the rich and give to the poor. They wanted to fight off competition for their specific jobs. They didn’t want anyone having access to cheaper fabrics and clothes and other things because that was their golden goose. They wanted to be in control and force you to go through the inefficient methods to get those things because it benefited themselves.
A closer modern day analog would be something like the dock workers striking to keep automation out of ports. They have a sweet gig and they don’t want machines doing anything to jeopardize their stranglehold on ports, even if it would benefit literally everyone else in the entire country if we could modernize our ports like the rest of the world.
I work 3 days one week, 4 days the next week. Never more than 3 days in a row. It's 12 hour shifts, which sucked at first, but I got used to it pretty quick. The free time is amazing. I took 2 days vacation this week and ended up with 9 days off in a row because of the holiday.
What field? Medical? Those scheduled seem common for medicine and fire/police.
I don't want to get too specific, but I'm a supervisor at a factory. Food stuff.
My girlfriend had a similar schedule when she worked at a hospital.
Good shoes like Brooks or Hoka and a good sleep schedule and it's doable. I only work 15 or 16 days a month. I work every other weekend, but the weekends I have off are 3 days.
it seems like the lack of consistency would b a net negative in life quality and very annoying to schedule around
Oh it totally is for some people. I don't have or want kids so that's not an issue for me. Scheduling things with friends isn't usually too hard, just have to be more intentional about it/schedule in advance. I like having days off during the week to get errands done when most other people are at work. And if I do need a weekend off that's usually fine because I accrue enough vacation hours where I usually end up selling back or rolling some over into the next year.
I did it for a summer in University and I didn't have to work night shifts, it was amazing to be honest I would do it again if I never had to work nights.
"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930
Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!
WFH alone, let alone compressed work schedules, can improve the "fertility crisis": https://www.nber.org/papers/w34963
Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It also gave my mind time to process issues in the background. When I had an ah-ha moment during my time off, I could note it down, and when I showed up on a work day, I was able to solve some of those problems I wasn't able to solve in the moment. It was a great system.
I've been trying to figure out how to bring the idea up to my boss of going back to it... at least the 4x10.
> During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep.
This is why 3x12 is not workable for average families. If you have kids and want to see them, 3x12 only works if you start really really early, then get to bed early when the kids do too.
I enjoyed 4x10 when I did it, but there were some real problems with some employees trying to adapt. Anecdotally we were seeing a lot of people who would barely work until the 8 hour mark and then just zone out or socialize while they waited the clock out at the end of the day.
Which is all too bad for those of us who work well with longer days.
in tech, we (frequently are expected to) work 5x12!
the four day work week has been trialed many times and already would have been the same or higher productivity before agents, honestly. if agents get really good let's just go to 3?
From an economic flow point of view:
Time not spent working could be time working on spending.
Yes. The leisure industry is, in fact, a real industry, and it is a service industry that creates a lot of employment.
If agents get really good maybe we can just not work?
We'll just be serfs of the AI billionaires.
No because the shareholders want more value. The best the C suite can do is downsize the team from 5 to 4 (or 3 if you like)
Cut it in half and double the workforce.
Different countries are going to distribute the benefits of automation in different ways. Northern European states will pursue shortened work weeks and lavish social services. China will reinvest the productivity gains into its industrial capacity. The United States will have five trillionaires.
Fine, we'll even call it "Elons Gambit" if that helps - in exchange for accepting AI in our lives 3 day weekends from here on out ...forever.
Top professionals whose comp is tied to performance didn't work 40hr 9-5s in the first place - but their comp is tied to performance, so when they have 10x the output they are compensated accordingly
Roles that come with a 40hr work week were already decoupled from performance, if AI made those workers 10x more productive they will rarely see the fruits of their productivity
On an individual level it seems like the correct move is to either move to a role that rewards output or organize and get equity comp as part of everyone's package
How can one move horizontally and then vertically? I have been thinking about getting into a more technical position. I work as a data engineer but essentially just a data modeller while manager and staff engineer took all the fun jobs -- it is even very hard to know what they are working on, so it is impossible to even ask for certain tickets.
And now with AI coming out in hot, and companies only hiring seniors, I found it very hard to move horizontally. It is not like I can't take a pay cut, but people simply won't hire someone who takes some time to learn the rope.
I might as well figure out how to increase my Charisma to 18 and sleep with someone at the top /s
Star Trek post-scarcity economy when??
https://rickwebb.medium.com/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab...
What Star Trek doesn't show is how they got there. I promise you it's going to be extremely painful, but once we're on the other side it'll be worth it.
I argue - there's nothing we can do to stop it; humanity, I mean. We will either achieve Star Trek or get wiped out as a species.
As a Kardashev Type 3, we will have achieved full automation. I'll leave the door open for Elysium problems, but hopefully Mr. Damon will save us then too.
Star Trek predicted riots around now because of vast numbers of unemployed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.
Star Trek might not show exactly how we got there, but they did put a lot of emphasis that humanity had to almost destroy itself before getting there.
WWIII lasted 25 years and it took another 100 years to rebuild after that. WWIII in universe is also scheduled for 2026 I believe.
we are very well past post-scarcity.
we definitely choose consumption over free time for the most part.
people generally choose nicer home, starbucks, vacay, neflix over work hours or retirement.
so this is a cultural issue
We are very well past the point where technology could allow post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is no longer technological problem, it's a political one. But it's still very much a problem, so no, we are not anywhere near post-scarcity.
I also don't understand the point you're making about people wanting to spend $15 on netflix or $12 on a coffee. Would everybody cutting netflix and lattes allow us to live in that utopia more quickly?
Yes, dropping consumption would immediately allow us to work 2-3 days a week.
It's far more a cultural problem than political.
We starting hitting post-scarcity at the start of the 19th century, towards the end of the industrial revolution [1]
We were growing enough food, housing is actually not that expensive, we were 'starting to not need that much more'.
This is when we started marketing consumption to the population - it was the only way to grow the economy.
We have far, far more than we need for basic satiety.
It's not quite so simple though - many innovations that we 'truly want', like medicines and health tech - come out of the economy as a whole and would not be possible were that the only hugely important sector.
We work 5 days on 2 days off because that's the very strongly entrenched social contract, it's the 'labour equilibrium'.
No amount of tech or AI will change that - unless we collectively agree to change the rules.
The social contract is slightly different in different countries, and nobody seems to have figured out how to work on 2-3 days, I believe that we mostly prefer the way it is. Maybe 4 day weeks would be more amenable.
But the marginal income from the 4th day ... I think people would prefer to work it rather than not.
[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...
Not until aliens land and show us the way. I firmly believe we aren’t presently capable of allowing a post-scarcity economy to exist — too much stuff is based on scarcity. So much so that we create scarcity instead of giving away excess. I’m thinking of food specifically.
If "stuff" === power over other people, then agree 100%.
There are people out there who would rather other people starve than they have one iota less prestige, power, influence or luxury. And, unfortunately, they are the people who wield most of the power in our society.
We have to solve that before we can solve the economics, which is the easy part.
We agree.
Maynard Keynes posited a future 15 hour work week in 1930 based on the productivity gains after WW1, nearly 100 years ago now.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
Farm, and you won't have to scavenge for food.
Get a tractor, and spend less time farming.
The factory will save time making tractors, so everybody can have one.
Computers will make the factories more efficient.
AI will make the computers more efficient.
I'm very frustrated that I don't have time to learn stuffs on job. They basically assume the productivity I'm supposed to get from using AI on tasks I'm familiar with.
And it definitely doesn't help when everyone hires "Seniors" only, so it's virtually impossible to switch tracks unless I sleep with the CXOs I guess. I have been nudging towards system programming for the previous 8 years, starting as a data analyst, to BI developer, and to data engineer -- well, I guess data engineer is my last stop for life.
Oh, don't worry. The way things are going with AI you're going to get a lot of days off.
As someone who negotiated 4 day weeks since early 2020 its been awesome. I get chores and yard work done and more family time every week. Wish it was standard.
Shoot, I'd be happy with free health care.
Many people would be happy with just a job in these times.
It’s all roses. AI is what exactly what the world needed. How can we not be grateful.
I agree with the premise of time away being easier. I don’t think the models/harnesses are there yet. There’s still a good amount of human input required to generate quality work.
So yes, take the day off but the models still need you to steer them when you’re back
On a tangent if you’re paying $6000 a month for your three children for childcare you are better off getting a Nanny for significantly lesser than that
What's preventing you from advertising your services as a contractor for 4 days a week?
This is certainly a fun exercise in economics. By taking a shortened work-week, should the companies then pay us 80% of our current comp? Or maybe a little less since they will have to pay for the added tokens we are now using as part of our job that we used to do manually (i.e. time)? Or perhaps we are able to justify that now they can save overhead by reducing facilities costs by 20% as well. Oh but maybe their business lease has a continuous occupancy clause and now the reduction in foot traffic causes them to get penalized so they need to reduce our salaries even more. Slippery slope my friend.
No. They should give you 40x your current pay. The AI made you 10x more productive, and you worked four days, so you generated 40x the economic output. As such, you should get 40x in pay. At this point, you're doing the company a favor by taking a day off as otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford you.
Sounds like the AI should get 36x the current pay. It's not as if the employee is bringing that to the table.
Oof, having a skillset so pedestrian that any incremental gain in efficiency needs to be kicked upwards must be tough.
If I am able to do 10x work with a tool that costs you Y, then my wages should rise by 10x - Y.
Then, let's do a 3 day work week and multiply it by 0.6.
Pretty simple math
Sure, unless others are willing to do your job for less than that.
Others are willing to do my job for less. And yet... here I am making what I make.
Are we paying people for their time, or for the results of their time?
If it's just time, then why are we doing so much overtime?
Sorry, exactly what is a slippery slope?
You wrote a lot of words, but none of them describe a slippery slope, or explain how a supposed 10x increase in productivity precludes a 20% reduction in hours worked.
You can have the day off. Don't think for a million years you will be paid for it.
Exactly. In the four days that you worked you produced 40 days of output, so you should get 40x the pay. It would be unreasonable for the company to pay you 50x what you were getting before... they do have shareholders to think about after all.
I can promise you this is not how the MBAs are reading the situation.
What are you talking about? Four days work = four days of output, by definition.
One of the top 3 liberating experiences I've had was escaping wage labor. There's just something so utterly insulting about the whole affair.
4 day work weeks have a lot of potential benefits
Instead of asking for the day off, some startups should just implement the practice and popularize it
I was always partial to the “make Wednesday a second weekend” plan. No more hump day and 2 “Fridays”. Of course that is also 2 “Mondays”
I have a similar wacky plan I like to call "Delete Thursday". Four day work week, and more weekends a year just by having six days a week instead of seven.
I was very happy working extra (I won't call them long) hours when I first learned about computing. A bit later on when I started working for financial entities I felt a bit different - the work was interesting, but I just wasn't prepared to sacrifice my time. And if we can have the day off, I think that can only be to the good.
I get where the writer is coming from, but it misses one very important point.
>> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You are thinking of productivity as "code written". And certainly that part of your job will get more productive.
But that is just something you do when you're not in meetings. (or when you're in a meeting, but the camera is off, and you're not really listening). Your real job is to attend meetings. And unfortunately AI can't help with that (yet).
(I'm not even being sarcastic. Most programmers don't realize that they have been hired to have meetings.)
What it can do is free you up from the pesky code-writing part of your job, freeing you up to attend even more meetings. And this does indeed make management happy because (seriously now) their job is having meetings, and you being "unavailable" (because you know, you want to program) was hindering them in the first place.
So no, you can't have Friday off, but now that you mention it, let's set aside that time for "team building" exercises...
AI definitely helps with attending meetings and writing documents that no one will read (both of which are huge parts of any modern job). The AI notes from any given meeting give you all of the content in 1/10th of the time.
I don't disagree that AI tools around meetings are cool. But they don't help you to "not attend the meeting". (not yet anyway).
Many meetings have 0% content "that applies to you". But that doesn't stop you being "added to meetings".
Best the powers that be can do is increase outsourcing since a 15$ an hour engineer + ai is most of the way to a 70$ an hour engineer + ai.
If I was smarter I’d have 200k in my 401k now. Assuming I live cheap in Vietnam and a good yield I’d just live off 10k usd per year
Where are you finding these $15/hr engineers that can pump out good PRs with Claude Code? I've taken a peak at a couple of firms and I am disappointed by their output.
I'm fairly certain a lot of people do this. They don't literally take a day off, but just work fewer hours or less hard. And this makes sense, there is a strong incentive to not give away all the productivity gains to your employer.
Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
the concern would be that this new ability will actually increase competition and give us less than we had before
this is not something that can just be blamed on the "CEOs/execs/shareholders" of the world. it is evolutionary competition - unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less", because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others. even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
I wish I knew what to do to fix it, doesn't seem sustainable but I don't know how to make all of humanity cooperate without doing something even worse
If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".
sadly life quality is not the thing that the competitive system is maximizing for, and thats one of the article's points. we compete to our own detriment, but to not compete is to become extinct
Did you just link to a rat website as if that is a good source?
A rat website? What does this mean, I'm out of the loop with SSC?
It's a pejorative shorthand for "Rationalist".
Why is "rationalist" suddenly a pejorative?
I am definitely out of the loop. I assume it is used pejoratively only by self-labelled idiots?
Good source for what? I'm just trying to point to a concept, an idea. There's no "facts" here, just speculation. If you disagree with the point there, why don't you just say what you think is true instead, I'm happy to discuss the ways in which the article is wrong
unless we can ALL join forces to draw the line somewhere, someone will choose to defect from the agreement to "just work less",
> We already did draw the line and we can redraw it. We drew the line very strongly at 40 hours, 4 days a week. That is the "official" expected hours for most salaried employees.
because doing so will make them succeed at the expense of others.
> This already happens. People making salary, 40 hours, that work 50, 60, etc. to get ahead of their coworkers in a career sense. Or people taking optional overtime to get ahead financially or people who work hourly working extra hours or people who have 2+ jobs or a side hustle.
even if everyone from one country agrees, the other competing country that defects and works 996 with agents will "win" and conquer the lazy country.
> Didn't realize Japan is imminently going to conquer the US because they work more hours.
The author's https://mlsu.io/posts/llm/cheats/ is also pretty good.
This reminds me of Ted Chiang's point that fear of technology is really fear of capitalism. https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-...
"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."
> It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
The problem is, it has always been that way - and not just in the US. The introduction of any kind of new technology or other way of disproportionately improving corporate bottom lines has always led to job losses, the key thing is what governments do in response to it.
The Industrial Revolution for example led to widespread devastation, the shift from agriculture being the dominant employer to industry and service sectors did not (as the ag workers were absorbed by the rapidly growing other sectors), the globalization / offshoring wave of neoliberalism once again led to widespread devastation, and AI will probably again lead to devastation.
And if Sam Altman isn't arrested for his blatant RAM market manipulation... I'm pretty sure there will be either people with pitchforks at the end or he will have ushered in, in retrospective, a new era of "stuff that uber rich people can get away with".
All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Yeah but the transition is rough. For example when we have autonomous vehicles what are all those drivers going to do. You might saw "tough luck" but we are a society not just an economy.
> All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone.
Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.
> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.
Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:
Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...
But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.
Everything you say is correct but it comes with a massive decrease in quality of life for the average person. Food will be 5x the cost, with less variety. Nobody wants to till the land anymore. Just like people 100 years ago didn't want to be hunters.
Are you willing to part with your smartphone and computer? I would bet not.
I agree for the most part, but fear of technological weapons is sort of the opposite of capitalism. So much of our technology stack was built by the government for warfare (including the internet) and in that sense is a form of socialism.
I fear being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance. Neither of which are driven by capitalism (although being targeted by either of those by some billionaire because I refuse to RTO is related).
How are neither of them being driven by capitalism?
U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> you are more afraid of being targeted by an AI drone and mass surveillance -> companies that make those weapons of war for the government (prime contractors) make billions -> they use their money to influence politics and public opinion -> U.S. becomes more authoritarian -> etc.
Capitalism is certainly one lever, but were we a communist country, I would still be afraid of the same thing. Centralization of power and ideology driving technological progress is in essence what I think we should all worry about.
The best way to take advantage right now is to consult. Take some time off and just do a little on the side. Then again the job market could collapse, so maybe keep your job?
How about you meet me half way and work 996 instead?
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you. I don't get why people don't understand this.
> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.
> Why? I don't need 10x more stuff.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
> The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
Either the product was 10x better, which I don't think I need, or it wasn't really a 10x increase in productivity.
Yea it's always been competition that's the issue. Greed too. But complacency is really difficult as a business owner.
In the world where someone can take your cake by working 25% more hours, it's always going to happen.
This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.
Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
Salaried people think they get paid for their output. No silly, you get paid for your time. Just like an hourly worker.
When FAANG were over hiring, nobody was being given 4 day weeks, instead AIUI, people were just given meaningless work to waste their time with.
Employers have two modes, waste peoples time, or sack them
Did anyone ask for the 8 hour work day?
Yes, activists fought and people died to achieve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
Instead they are going to say “oh you’re 10Xing?” sweet we can get rid of 9 people and you can keep working all week long qq
The whole thing is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but sarcasm is a potent mode of communication.
The joke, of course, being that every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Economists have been predicting a boom in human leisure time since the dawn of economics. It has NEVER happened...
> every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.
Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.
The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.
But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.
And not be off completely...
Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time, and certainly not in a way that's proportional to the gains of automation. Instead, companies will expect still more productivity. Why give you more time off if they can keep workdays fixed and add still more productivity? Certainly, the competition will do it.
Appetite grows with eating.
> Labor saving tech doesn't lead to more free time
It does when you own the tech. If you give the tech away then the people who you gave it to will continue to expect more of the same, naturally.
Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.
It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").
With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.
If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.
The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.
I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.
Sorry, not possible. The goal of AI is to build additional value for shareholders, not to improve anyone's else's lives.
Workers need to have more leverage for them to be able to independently assert their working hours. People with such luxury become contractors or proprietors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
> If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
You must be new here. No, that's not how this work. If you are able to produce the same amount of work by midday Monday we expect you to increase the amount of output in the current system by 14 x. And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
> And the owners pocket the financial gain from this productivity delta and you should be happy you even have a job.
This is why it’s prudent for more of us to figure out a way to be our own owners.
What a community of temporarily embarrassed unicorns we have here.
FYI, you've already lost with this mindset! I know you don't consider yourself a loser :P
here, here.
lmao Corporate had a hissy fit from people working full weeks at home. The 4-day work week will never* come to the US.
* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.
1 And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said unto Pharaoh: 'Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness.'2 And Pharaoh said: 'Who is the LORD, that I should hearken unto His voice to let Israel go? I know not the LORD, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'
3 And they said: 'The God of the Hebrews hath met with us. Let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the LORD our God; lest He fall upon us with pestilence, or with the sword.'4 And the king of Egypt said unto them: 'Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, cause the people to break loose from their work? get you unto your burdens.'5 And Pharaoh said: 'Behold, the people of the land are now many, and will ye make them rest from their burdens?'6 And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying:7 'Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.9 Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard lying words.'
10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers, and they spoke to the people, saying: 'Thus saith Pharaoh: I will not give you straw.11 Go yourselves, get you straw where ye can find it; for nought of your work shall be diminished.'12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw.13 And the taskmasters were urgent, saying: 'Fulfil your work, your daily task, as when there was straw.'14 And the officers of the children of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, saying: 'Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your appointed task in making brick both yesterday and today as heretofore?'
Sorry, I'd rather have a higher quality of living for most people (as evidenced by any huge development in technology) rather than humanity stagnating. This post is quite myopic.
I'm deadly certain that routing more of society into producing SaaS webapp shovelware (and the infrastructure to support it) is not in fact going to improve quality of life, and will in fact cause us to stagnate.
I would be able to see my niece in person and hear her laugh if I could have this Friday off.
i really dislike lazy bums. you are in a position to use great tools for productivity and you're not inspired to work harder? you should be fired on the spot.
Fired on the spot? The hyperbole doesn't help your argument.
What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.
indeed those who engage in the capitalistic system without devoting the entirety of their soul to generation of profit, they are subhuman and therefore deserve to be subservient. true humanity is found in embodying our animal nature and maximizing the influence of individual genetics - money is a mere vehicle to express the totality of the human spirit. those lacking money clearly lack spirit and should be considered beneath humanity, effectively equivalent to livestock. baa baa black sheep, give me every last thread of your wool or be exiled