People have been saying this for more than 100 years - see the old popular mechanics articles predicting a 10 hour work week due to automation's production gain

People have been saying this for more than 100 years - see the old popular mechanics articles predicting a 10 hour work week due to automation's production gains, quotes from Buckminster Fuller, references to Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano", etc., but instead of coordinating these gains with one another we have left them up for grabs for whoever scrambles harder, and the baseline creeps upward. Just like the economics analogy where some people in a seated audience stand for a better view, requiring everyone to stand for more or less the same view as before but with more effort, only with some American Horatio Alger pull-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps mythology mixed in. This is not inevitable, it is policy we choose, as opposed to some European countries where workweeks have actually shrunk and retail hours are much more restricted. We have decided much of the gains from automation and better average human health and lifespan should go elsewhere.