17 ms·

If AI Lets Us Do More in Less Time–Why Not Shorten the Workweek?

73 points by sergeyfomkin 1y ago

tupac_speedrap 1y ago
You've got to learn to play the game, the only reward for working hard nowadays is more work so you have just work just the right amount
lysecret 1y ago
I'm pretty sure we will, because we already have? Remember work used to be 6 days a week.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Labor now does not have the power that it did then because people have been convinced to vote based on fear of pronouns and immigrants.
atemerev 1y ago
Because the masses need to be be busy, otherwise they would get ideas.
- Ygg2 1y ago
  But why not work 8 days a week? 7 regular days and one extra day spread out. 9.5 hours 7 days a week. That way, masses won't ever have time to think!
  - atemerev 1y ago
    The current balance of engagement / sustainability of 8 hours per day, 5 days a week was reached after decades of trial and error. One might argue that it converged during the industrial age (it was 6 days a week in agricultural age), but it worked fine in a post-industrial economy as well.
- M95D 1y ago
  > otherwise they would get ideas. No, they won't. They'll just spend more time on their phones watching cat videos.
  - atemerev 1y ago
    True, that usually works, but not in the time of economic downturn.
faefox 1y ago
Because capital has realized that as long as there are bread and circuses to distract people along with convenient targets for the less well-off to blame for their misfortune (immigrants, trans folks) they can continue to vacuum up all of the wealth and power for themselves without lifting a finger to improve the lives of those whose labor makes it all possible.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  While people simultaneously scream for people to have more children. See you at terminally low total fertility rates.
  - jf22 1y ago
    I follow the pro/anti natalist space and I'm not sure if anybody is "screaming" at people to have more kids.
    - assbuttbuttass 1y ago
      How about the vice president https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-birth-rates-555c0f78ef8dd4c13c88b9e8d5f0024a https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-bir...
      - jf22 1y ago
        Is this "screaming?"
    - Analemma_ 1y ago
      It’s less “screaming” and more “tut-tut moralizing and shaming”. Ironically, it’s mostly from the same people who spent the previous decades going “don’t have kids you can’t afford!” and are now appalled that people took their advice.
      - js8 1y ago
        Wasn't the previous advice meant for black and muslim people, rather than WASPs?
jvanderbot 1y ago
I've heard this one before. There is no business in the world, except those already financially unhealthy, that would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost. It just goes against every business ethos except Arizona Iced Tea.
- lee-rhapsody 1y ago
  >No business would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost. If that were the case, why are so many companies bent on eliminating some employees and equipping the rest with AI to make up the difference? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to retain ALL those employees and equip them all with AI?
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    In my strawman/false dichotomy world, I'd explain that by saying those companies are facing the certainty of being not financially healthy. The AI wave is masking a lot of poor economic outlook at the moment
- const_cast 1y ago
  Right, which demonstrates the unfortunate: this has to be done politically, not economically. The only way you can get rid of the 40 hour work week is if you make it illegal, much like we did with more exploitative working practices in the early 20th century.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    I agree with that, but do people want to work less than 40 hours a week? I know I do, but I don't speak for everyone. It feels as though we've reached a compromise some time back where people are roughly ok with trading 40 hours of their productivity per week for enough units to live a pretty comfortable life on (comfortable is relative, and we're relatively much more comfortable than 99% of humans who ever lived).
eli_gottlieb 1y ago
Because the workers don't have the bargaining power to shorten the workweek at the moment. It's a fine idea in principle.
MBCook 1y ago
We didn’t when we got computers. We didn’t when we got calculators. Or typewriters. Or the Industrial Revolution. Or anything else. Work expands to fill available hours. We don’t get more leisure time. That’s not ‘allowed’.
- ainiriand 1y ago
  As strange as it is hear this in this day and age, these kind of improvements bring more profits to the capital that uses them. The working class will only get any benefits through class fight and collective action, but that ship has sailed. Capitalism has won.
  - collingreen 1y ago
    It's never over it's just also never easy
- frantzmiccoli 1y ago
  To offer (maybe European) perspective. The industrial revolution coincides more or less with when starvation started to disappear from the developed world. In many countries, holidays and PTO are a norm. I personally know a few people that choose to work 4 days a week, I know another bunch that actually retired early or simply don't jump from a job to another because they can free ride for a bit (no judgment). That also means that you 1/ have to actually prioritize leisure over money 2/ have actually something leisurely to do.
  - drstewart 1y ago
    >To offer (maybe European) perspective. Aren't retirement ages being raised everwhere across Europe?
    - deafpolygon 1y ago
      Yes, to reflect the rising life expectancy.
dylan604 1y ago
Because nobody's TODO list is empty. Just because you can "accomplish" tasks in less time does not mean that the next task doesn't need to be started until next week. It just means you can close your tickets faster, not that there's nothing left to do.
- tempfile 1y ago
  Do you come in on Saturdays, since your TODO list is still not empty?
  - dylan604 1y ago
    When I was an hourly employee, I used to come in on Saturdays and earn 1.5x and then on Sunday to earn 2x. That was when I was young and dumb with nothing else to do to fill those hours so why not make some extra money? Now that I’m no longer hourly, I work for as long as necessary to accomplish task by deadline. It is none of my employer’s, nor yours, business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met
    - tempfile 1y ago
      > It is none of my employer’s business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met This contradicts what you already said ("there are always more TODOs"). Which one should I reply to? If your employment has fixed deadlines, and your employer does not react to efficiency increases by setting earlier deadlines, then you should expect the headline effect (efficiency increases mean your weekly hours decrease).
      - dylan604 1y ago
        Again though, how I manage my time is my business. If I'm assigned a task on Monday with a deadline for Friday, I can finish it on Monday and have it ready for the Friday deadline and then spend my time how I wish OR I can report the task completed and then expect to have more tasks assigned. There's no need to have a negotiation with how any tools that I use makes me more efficient. You seem to be unable to manage your own time and need to be told by employer when to have time off. That's something you should try changing rather than expecting the world to change to how you want to spend time.
tempfile 1y ago
Because the enterprise is not owned or controlled by you, and you don't get to set the rules. If you can negotiate better conditions, and nobody else on the market can undercut you, then you can have them. This isn't even an abstract consequence of capitalism, it is an axiomatic, defining feature. If you don't like it, you are rejecting capitalism.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  Unfettered capitalism is bad. We are just discussing which fetters it should have.
- keybored 1y ago
  I am rejecting it. Enough is enough.
dfxm12 1y ago
but to share the gains from new technologies AI has nothing to do with this. Worker productivity has already been shooting up and workers have been given nothing to match their efforts. As long as capitalism is the default economic system, any pro-worker change will have to be taken. Most corporations can't even allow workers to toil anywhere but under their direct supervision. Giving people more free time is clearly out of the question.
deadbabe 1y ago
The workweek does shorten, in those quiet moments when workers are not doing much of anything. Lord knows that software engineers, who already spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, are now doing even less thanks to improvements in AI automation. I’d bet that software engineers are down to about 3 day work weeks when you sum up all the time they spend actually doing something. It doesn’t feel like it for some people though because they are imprisoned in offices, where they are restricted from doing anything with their time that isn’t work. It is a cruel condition that leads to burnout and long term loss in productivity. It only gets worse as even more efficiency in automation results in having to perform even more office theatre to fill the down time. My advice to would-be CEOs and managers is to just let people be, don’t try to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s good to have some slack in the workline for when you need it, because the workers who have been treated well are far more likely to jump into an emergency and dump massive loads of work all at once, since they have a lot in reserves. Those emergencies are moments that make or break companies.
- sergeyfomkin 1y ago
  Yep, the irony is that the workweek has quietly shrunk — but instead of freeing people, we trap them in offices and force them to fake productivity. It’s not about output anymore, it’s about control. That’s what a formal 4-day week could challenge.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    I think a 4-day work week isn’t really ideal. The problem is you will increase cycle times. There is a sort of time dilation that occurs around weekends. Thursdays will become the new Fridays and on Mondays people will be kind of groggy from being out for 3 days. So basically Tuesdays and Wednesdays become the days to really do hardcore work. That means it takes longer to get big projects done as people naturally schedule things around Tuesdays and Wednesdays. A better model is to just have people be remote, and do a little bit of work each workday. This keeps people a little more fresh and boils their days down to just getting 1 or 2 important decisions made.
    - 1y ago
qsort 1y ago
You do understand that asking to work 32 hours rather than 40 is exactly the same thing as asking a 25% raise right? I'm not against workers asking for more money in the slightest, they don't do that nearly as often as they should, but this sounds a bit like "big brain idea: give me more money lol".
- js8 1y ago
  No it's not the same thing. The difference is productivity growth. If you ask 25% more ceteris paribus, someone has to give something up. In this case, nobody has to give something up.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >No it's not the same thing. ... screams the economics-illiterate left. If they pay you money for your work/time, then it's by definition fungible.
    - old_man_cato 1y ago
      No sense in responding, people. This person can't be saved. Move on.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- frabcus 1y ago
  It is different, because productive output does not go down by 20% when working hours go down by 20%. e.g. See "Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649 The OP is arguing this is even more true when AI does routine tasks, and the remaining tasks are more creative, strategic, inspiration-based.
- keybored 1y ago
  Or it’s "asking" for more of the productivity to go to workers instead of the capitalists.
throwpoaster 1y ago
Because employees compete to sell more or less of their time for more or less money, and it’s generally an over-served market where they have little pricing power. As a business owner I’m using AI to hire fewer people for less time, massively reducing HR headaches. It’s great!
causalmodels 1y ago
Lump of labor fallacy strikes again.
- sghiassy 1y ago
  Why economists dislike a lump of labor - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346760701635809 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/003467607016358...
  - causalmodels 1y ago
    Sorry but I'm not going to pay 56 dollars to read a 17 year old paper with 18 citations.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Yes, there will be many new jobs as cannon fodder for the upper classes in various overseas wars.
  - causalmodels 1y ago
    Or like as therapists as we continue to 'do the work' via buying new and increasingly strange forms of self exploration. But also get real if you don't believe that kill bots won't take all the cannon fodder jobs. Computer programs don't have the nasty habit of disobeying orders or revolt.
eweise 1y ago
"This question is increasingly central to debates about the future of work" Nope. The only question my company is asking is how to get more efficiencies from AI so that they don't have to hire so many people.
BurningFrog 1y ago
I've gotten a shorter work week a few times by asking my boss. You can just do things!
- discordance 1y ago
  My company is in the midst of laying off thousands of people and I'm certain if I requested a 4 day work week I would be short listed for the door.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    I'm aware my workplace experiences are atypical, but I would expect that they'd count that as 20% of a layoff, and that would be appreciated.
qwerty456127 1y ago
32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish). People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  They won't reduce the workweek without reducing your pay. There might be some 3-card-monte-style shuffling so that it seems like they didn't (at first), but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product. In the United States, employees have no leverage.
  - exe34 1y ago
    > In the United States, employees have no leverage. If only there was some kind of organisation that workers could form to improve their collective bargaining power...
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      If there were some kind of organization like that, mobsters would take it over, and they'd collude with the business to squeeze the workers for all they're worth. Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them. Besides, in an economy where many are unemployed and desperately seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more. Only the most mature companies can afford the extra overhead of a unionized workforce... how many of the people here reading your comment work for startups? Do you think that they read it and say to themselves "gee, I know that we can barely afford to keep the lights on and we're just six, but I wish there was a union here holding the CEO's head under water until he gives us more raises"?
      - 1y ago
js8 1y ago
There is a famous essay on the topic (although it talks about employment rather than workweek, but that's just an extra lottery on top of workweek length): https://jacobin.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employment-kalecki-job-guarantee https://jacobin.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employ...
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Competition drives ever increasing growth. China uses the same AI and they aren’t decreasing their work weeks. Are you going to let China steam roll America like it already has in almost every major industry?
BurningFrog 1y ago
This discussion seems entirely uninformed by history. We have continuously been able to do more in less time because of new technology for 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution since. The increased productivity has benefited workers either by higher wages or shorter hours. Mostly the former. I'm sure this trend will continue.
- keybored 1y ago
  Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s, at least in the US. Productivity has gone up while wages have stagnated.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    Most people in the world today are way better off than they were in the 70s.
    - keybored 1y ago
      That wages have stagnated is not a lie. People might be better off according to some metric despite the fact that wages have stagnated. Could you not move the goalpost?
      - munksbeer 1y ago
        This is the part I responded to: > Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context. Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes. Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes. Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s. I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.
        keybored 1y ago
tboyd47 1y ago
It would lead to people having more free time, which leads to self-determination and independence from corporate power structures, which empowers the middle class, which the owners and controllers of global financialized capital do not want. Your job will continue to be at least 40 hours, the base pay adjusted for inflation will decrease, the "benefits" that are too complicated to understand and extract yourself from will increase, and you definitely will come back into the office one day. =)
jamesgasek 1y ago
Because more people will be building things, business competition will not decrease. There will be even more to do.
thriifvyu67866 1y ago
Because the world is not about the wage-slaves; it's about the elites and their power games. And they'll exhaust humanity, destroy ecosystems, and kill all the flora and fauna to achieve this.
pxc 1y ago
Because for capital, shortening the work week is leaving money on the table! Leisure time for the masses does have technological requirements, but actually increasing it across the society is more of a problem of power and politics than of technology. It's been this way for a long, long time. It was like this when we won the 8-hour day norm that we have now! The 8-hour day may have been enabled by technology in some sense, but it was won with a fight.
gruez 1y ago
"If tractors and fertilizers lets us grow more food with less time - why not shorten the workweek?" For instance the amount of people employed in agriculture in France dropped from 60% in the 1800s to 3% today, a 95% reduction. Assuming everyone worked 40 hour weeks back in 1800s, that means everyone should only have to work 2 hours a week today, right? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-employed-in-agriculture?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...
- keybored 1y ago
  You also have to factor in the jobs that transport the food, parts of the jobs that make the roads/railways/airplanes (not all places are self-sustained food-wise, so this isn’t just about getting bananas from the tropics), jobs involved in refining food, and more.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
kgwgk 1y ago
Because people would rather work more to get more money.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  that isn't the problem, the problem is that people actually work more to get same or less money too :)
  - kgwgk 1y ago
    Given the choice between working 20% less for the same money and earning 20% more for the same work many (most?) people will take the latter. I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few. I would venture a solid guess that for 88.91% of the population - if their salary is reduced by their employer by 20% they would stay in the same place and not look for another job...
tempodox 1y ago
When was the last time that productivity gains were translated into fewer working hours per week?
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Or higher wages or greater employment. Never, of course.
more_corn 1y ago
Because AI is the property of the owning class and they use it to spend less for labor from the working class?
deafpolygon 1y ago
Because they don’t want to pay you more.
ponector 1y ago
Because you can shorten workforce instead!
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Because your peers are still working. In the West there’s a 40-hour work week. In China there’s 996. In Japan you don’t go home til your boss does - even if you hardly see your family. Each society has norms that stop people working even more than they otherwise would. Everyone converges on that amount of work, regardless of productivity. If you want to work less, you need to get everyone else to work less.
tsoukase 1y ago
Since at least the last 100 years any value surplus due to some technological advancement was added to top rich wealth. Few was used to raise salaries and very few to shorten work hours. At the past, the top rich were centimillionaires, now billionaires. AI is time to create trillionaires...

73 points by sergeyfomkin 1y ago

You've got to learn to play the game, the only reward for working hard nowadays is more work so you have just work just the right amount

lysecret 1y ago

I'm pretty sure we will, because we already have? Remember work used to be 6 days a week.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Labor now does not have the power that it did then because people have been convinced to vote based on fear of pronouns and immigrants.

atemerev 1y ago

Because the masses need to be be busy, otherwise they would get ideas.

Ygg2 1y ago
But why not work 8 days a week? 7 regular days and one extra day spread out. 9.5 hours 7 days a week. That way, masses won't ever have time to think!
- atemerev 1y ago
  The current balance of engagement / sustainability of 8 hours per day, 5 days a week was reached after decades of trial and error. One might argue that it converged during the industrial age (it was 6 days a week in agricultural age), but it worked fine in a post-industrial economy as well.
M95D 1y ago
> otherwise they would get ideas. No, they won't. They'll just spend more time on their phones watching cat videos.
- atemerev 1y ago
  True, that usually works, but not in the time of economic downturn.

faefox 1y ago

Because capital has realized that as long as there are bread and circuses to distract people along with convenient targets for the less well-off to blame for their misfortune (immigrants, trans folks) they can continue to vacuum up all of the wealth and power for themselves without lifting a finger to improve the lives of those whose labor makes it all possible.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
While people simultaneously scream for people to have more children. See you at terminally low total fertility rates.
- jf22 1y ago
  I follow the pro/anti natalist space and I'm not sure if anybody is "screaming" at people to have more kids.
  - assbuttbuttass 1y ago
    How about the vice president https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-birth-rates-555c0f78ef8dd4c13c88b9e8d5f0024a https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-bir...
    - jf22 1y ago
      Is this "screaming?"
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    It’s less “screaming” and more “tut-tut moralizing and shaming”. Ironically, it’s mostly from the same people who spent the previous decades going “don’t have kids you can’t afford!” and are now appalled that people took their advice.
    - js8 1y ago
      Wasn't the previous advice meant for black and muslim people, rather than WASPs?

jvanderbot 1y ago

I've heard this one before. There is no business in the world, except those already financially unhealthy, that would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost. It just goes against every business ethos except Arizona Iced Tea.

lee-rhapsody 1y ago
>No business would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost. If that were the case, why are so many companies bent on eliminating some employees and equipping the rest with AI to make up the difference? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to retain ALL those employees and equip them all with AI?
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  In my strawman/false dichotomy world, I'd explain that by saying those companies are facing the certainty of being not financially healthy. The AI wave is masking a lot of poor economic outlook at the moment
const_cast 1y ago
Right, which demonstrates the unfortunate: this has to be done politically, not economically. The only way you can get rid of the 40 hour work week is if you make it illegal, much like we did with more exploitative working practices in the early 20th century.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  I agree with that, but do people want to work less than 40 hours a week? I know I do, but I don't speak for everyone. It feels as though we've reached a compromise some time back where people are roughly ok with trading 40 hours of their productivity per week for enough units to live a pretty comfortable life on (comfortable is relative, and we're relatively much more comfortable than 99% of humans who ever lived).

eli_gottlieb 1y ago

Because the workers don't have the bargaining power to shorten the workweek at the moment. It's a fine idea in principle.

MBCook 1y ago

We didn’t when we got computers. We didn’t when we got calculators. Or typewriters. Or the Industrial Revolution. Or anything else. Work expands to fill available hours. We don’t get more leisure time. That’s not ‘allowed’.

ainiriand 1y ago
As strange as it is hear this in this day and age, these kind of improvements bring more profits to the capital that uses them. The working class will only get any benefits through class fight and collective action, but that ship has sailed. Capitalism has won.
- collingreen 1y ago
  It's never over it's just also never easy
frantzmiccoli 1y ago
To offer (maybe European) perspective. The industrial revolution coincides more or less with when starvation started to disappear from the developed world. In many countries, holidays and PTO are a norm. I personally know a few people that choose to work 4 days a week, I know another bunch that actually retired early or simply don't jump from a job to another because they can free ride for a bit (no judgment). That also means that you 1/ have to actually prioritize leisure over money 2/ have actually something leisurely to do.
- drstewart 1y ago
  >To offer (maybe European) perspective. Aren't retirement ages being raised everwhere across Europe?
  - deafpolygon 1y ago
    Yes, to reflect the rising life expectancy.

dylan604 1y ago

Because nobody's TODO list is empty. Just because you can "accomplish" tasks in less time does not mean that the next task doesn't need to be started until next week. It just means you can close your tickets faster, not that there's nothing left to do.

tempfile 1y ago
Do you come in on Saturdays, since your TODO list is still not empty?
- dylan604 1y ago
  When I was an hourly employee, I used to come in on Saturdays and earn 1.5x and then on Sunday to earn 2x. That was when I was young and dumb with nothing else to do to fill those hours so why not make some extra money? Now that I’m no longer hourly, I work for as long as necessary to accomplish task by deadline. It is none of my employer’s, nor yours, business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met
  - tempfile 1y ago
    > It is none of my employer’s business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met This contradicts what you already said ("there are always more TODOs"). Which one should I reply to? If your employment has fixed deadlines, and your employer does not react to efficiency increases by setting earlier deadlines, then you should expect the headline effect (efficiency increases mean your weekly hours decrease).
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Again though, how I manage my time is my business. If I'm assigned a task on Monday with a deadline for Friday, I can finish it on Monday and have it ready for the Friday deadline and then spend my time how I wish OR I can report the task completed and then expect to have more tasks assigned. There's no need to have a negotiation with how any tools that I use makes me more efficient. You seem to be unable to manage your own time and need to be told by employer when to have time off. That's something you should try changing rather than expecting the world to change to how you want to spend time.

tempfile 1y ago

Because the enterprise is not owned or controlled by you, and you don't get to set the rules. If you can negotiate better conditions, and nobody else on the market can undercut you, then you can have them. This isn't even an abstract consequence of capitalism, it is an axiomatic, defining feature. If you don't like it, you are rejecting capitalism.

amanaplanacanal 1y ago
Unfettered capitalism is bad. We are just discussing which fetters it should have.
keybored 1y ago
I am rejecting it. Enough is enough.

dfxm12 1y ago

but to share the gains from new technologies AI has nothing to do with this. Worker productivity has already been shooting up and workers have been given nothing to match their efforts. As long as capitalism is the default economic system, any pro-worker change will have to be taken. Most corporations can't even allow workers to toil anywhere but under their direct supervision. Giving people more free time is clearly out of the question.

deadbabe 1y ago

The workweek does shorten, in those quiet moments when workers are not doing much of anything. Lord knows that software engineers, who already spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, are now doing even less thanks to improvements in AI automation. I’d bet that software engineers are down to about 3 day work weeks when you sum up all the time they spend actually doing something. It doesn’t feel like it for some people though because they are imprisoned in offices, where they are restricted from doing anything with their time that isn’t work. It is a cruel condition that leads to burnout and long term loss in productivity. It only gets worse as even more efficiency in automation results in having to perform even more office theatre to fill the down time. My advice to would-be CEOs and managers is to just let people be, don’t try to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s good to have some slack in the workline for when you need it, because the workers who have been treated well are far more likely to jump into an emergency and dump massive loads of work all at once, since they have a lot in reserves. Those emergencies are moments that make or break companies.

sergeyfomkin 1y ago
Yep, the irony is that the workweek has quietly shrunk — but instead of freeing people, we trap them in offices and force them to fake productivity. It’s not about output anymore, it’s about control. That’s what a formal 4-day week could challenge.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  I think a 4-day work week isn’t really ideal. The problem is you will increase cycle times. There is a sort of time dilation that occurs around weekends. Thursdays will become the new Fridays and on Mondays people will be kind of groggy from being out for 3 days. So basically Tuesdays and Wednesdays become the days to really do hardcore work. That means it takes longer to get big projects done as people naturally schedule things around Tuesdays and Wednesdays. A better model is to just have people be remote, and do a little bit of work each workday. This keeps people a little more fresh and boils their days down to just getting 1 or 2 important decisions made.
  - 1y ago

qsort 1y ago

You do understand that asking to work 32 hours rather than 40 is exactly the same thing as asking a 25% raise right? I'm not against workers asking for more money in the slightest, they don't do that nearly as often as they should, but this sounds a bit like "big brain idea: give me more money lol".

js8 1y ago
No it's not the same thing. The difference is productivity growth. If you ask 25% more ceteris paribus, someone has to give something up. In this case, nobody has to give something up.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >No it's not the same thing. ... screams the economics-illiterate left. If they pay you money for your work/time, then it's by definition fungible.
  - old_man_cato 1y ago
    No sense in responding, people. This person can't be saved. Move on.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
frabcus 1y ago
It is different, because productive output does not go down by 20% when working hours go down by 20%. e.g. See "Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649 The OP is arguing this is even more true when AI does routine tasks, and the remaining tasks are more creative, strategic, inspiration-based.
keybored 1y ago
Or it’s "asking" for more of the productivity to go to workers instead of the capitalists.

throwpoaster 1y ago

Because employees compete to sell more or less of their time for more or less money, and it’s generally an over-served market where they have little pricing power. As a business owner I’m using AI to hire fewer people for less time, massively reducing HR headaches. It’s great!

causalmodels 1y ago

Lump of labor fallacy strikes again.

sghiassy 1y ago
Why economists dislike a lump of labor - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346760701635809 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/003467607016358...
- causalmodels 1y ago
  Sorry but I'm not going to pay 56 dollars to read a 17 year old paper with 18 citations.
bgwalter 1y ago
Yes, there will be many new jobs as cannon fodder for the upper classes in various overseas wars.
- causalmodels 1y ago
  Or like as therapists as we continue to 'do the work' via buying new and increasingly strange forms of self exploration. But also get real if you don't believe that kill bots won't take all the cannon fodder jobs. Computer programs don't have the nasty habit of disobeying orders or revolt.

eweise 1y ago

"This question is increasingly central to debates about the future of work" Nope. The only question my company is asking is how to get more efficiencies from AI so that they don't have to hire so many people.

BurningFrog 1y ago

I've gotten a shorter work week a few times by asking my boss. You can just do things!

discordance 1y ago
My company is in the midst of laying off thousands of people and I'm certain if I requested a 4 day work week I would be short listed for the door.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  I'm aware my workplace experiences are atypical, but I would expect that they'd count that as 20% of a layoff, and that would be appreciated.

qwerty456127 1y ago

32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish). People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
They won't reduce the workweek without reducing your pay. There might be some 3-card-monte-style shuffling so that it seems like they didn't (at first), but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product. In the United States, employees have no leverage.
- exe34 1y ago
  > In the United States, employees have no leverage. If only there was some kind of organisation that workers could form to improve their collective bargaining power...
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    If there were some kind of organization like that, mobsters would take it over, and they'd collude with the business to squeeze the workers for all they're worth. Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them. Besides, in an economy where many are unemployed and desperately seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more. Only the most mature companies can afford the extra overhead of a unionized workforce... how many of the people here reading your comment work for startups? Do you think that they read it and say to themselves "gee, I know that we can barely afford to keep the lights on and we're just six, but I wish there was a union here holding the CEO's head under water until he gives us more raises"?
    - 1y ago

js8 1y ago

There is a famous essay on the topic (although it talks about employment rather than workweek, but that's just an extra lottery on top of workweek length): https://jacobin.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employment-kalecki-job-guarantee https://jacobin.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employ...

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Competition drives ever increasing growth. China uses the same AI and they aren’t decreasing their work weeks. Are you going to let China steam roll America like it already has in almost every major industry?

BurningFrog 1y ago

This discussion seems entirely uninformed by history. We have continuously been able to do more in less time because of new technology for 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution since. The increased productivity has benefited workers either by higher wages or shorter hours. Mostly the former. I'm sure this trend will continue.

keybored 1y ago
Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s, at least in the US. Productivity has gone up while wages have stagnated.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  Most people in the world today are way better off than they were in the 70s.
  - keybored 1y ago
    That wages have stagnated is not a lie. People might be better off according to some metric despite the fact that wages have stagnated. Could you not move the goalpost?
    - munksbeer 1y ago
      This is the part I responded to: > Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context. Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes. Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes. Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s. I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.
      - keybored 1y ago

tboyd47 1y ago

It would lead to people having more free time, which leads to self-determination and independence from corporate power structures, which empowers the middle class, which the owners and controllers of global financialized capital do not want. Your job will continue to be at least 40 hours, the base pay adjusted for inflation will decrease, the "benefits" that are too complicated to understand and extract yourself from will increase, and you definitely will come back into the office one day. =)

jamesgasek 1y ago

Because more people will be building things, business competition will not decrease. There will be even more to do.

thriifvyu67866 1y ago

Because the world is not about the wage-slaves; it's about the elites and their power games. And they'll exhaust humanity, destroy ecosystems, and kill all the flora and fauna to achieve this.

pxc 1y ago

Because for capital, shortening the work week is leaving money on the table! Leisure time for the masses does have technological requirements, but actually increasing it across the society is more of a problem of power and politics than of technology. It's been this way for a long, long time. It was like this when we won the 8-hour day norm that we have now! The 8-hour day may have been enabled by technology in some sense, but it was won with a fight.

gruez 1y ago

"If tractors and fertilizers lets us grow more food with less time - why not shorten the workweek?" For instance the amount of people employed in agriculture in France dropped from 60% in the 1800s to 3% today, a 95% reduction. Assuming everyone worked 40 hour weeks back in 1800s, that means everyone should only have to work 2 hours a week today, right? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-employed-in-agriculture?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

keybored 1y ago
You also have to factor in the jobs that transport the food, parts of the jobs that make the roads/railways/airplanes (not all places are self-sustained food-wise, so this isn’t just about getting bananas from the tropics), jobs involved in refining food, and more.

aaron695 1y ago

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kgwgk 1y ago

Because people would rather work more to get more money.

bdangubic 1y ago
that isn't the problem, the problem is that people actually work more to get same or less money too :)
- kgwgk 1y ago
  Given the choice between working 20% less for the same money and earning 20% more for the same work many (most?) people will take the latter. I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few. I would venture a solid guess that for 88.91% of the population - if their salary is reduced by their employer by 20% they would stay in the same place and not look for another job...

tempodox 1y ago

When was the last time that productivity gains were translated into fewer working hours per week?

burnt-resistor 1y ago
Or higher wages or greater employment. Never, of course.

more_corn 1y ago

Because AI is the property of the owning class and they use it to spend less for labor from the working class?

deafpolygon 1y ago

Because they don’t want to pay you more.

ponector 1y ago

Because you can shorten workforce instead!

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Because your peers are still working. In the West there’s a 40-hour work week. In China there’s 996. In Japan you don’t go home til your boss does - even if you hardly see your family. Each society has norms that stop people working even more than they otherwise would. Everyone converges on that amount of work, regardless of productivity. If you want to work less, you need to get everyone else to work less.

tsoukase 1y ago

Since at least the last 100 years any value surplus due to some technological advancement was added to top rich wealth. Few was used to raise salaries and very few to shorten work hours. At the past, the top rich were centimillionaires, now billionaires. AI is time to create trillionaires...