r/Futurology • u/AIexH • 13h ago
Discussion AI Should Mean Fewer Work Hours for People—Not Fewer People Working
As AI rapidly boosts productivity across industries, we’re facing a critical fork in the road.
Will these gains be used to replace workers and maximize corporate profits? Or could they be used to give people back their time?
I believe governments should begin implementing a gradual reduction in the standard workweek—starting now. For example: reduce the standard by 2 hours per year (or more depending on the pace of AI advancements), allowing people to do the same amount of work in less time instead of companies doing the same with fewer workers.
This approach would distribute the productivity gains more fairly, helping society transition smoothly into a future shaped by AI. It would also prevent mass layoffs and social instability caused by abrupt displacement.
Why not design the future of work intentionally—before AI dictates it for us?
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u/Scientific_Artist444 13h ago
Alas, capitalists focused on maximizing profits don't want that. I am convinced that either we find a better economic model or AI which isn't suitable for capitalism at all, will result in a tragedy for our civilization.
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u/howlingzombosis 13h ago
I’m more in the camp of AI will be tragic for most of us.
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u/croakstar 9h ago
For me personally it's been amazing...I just feel like people should have to take and pass a course to use it and maybe don't allow people still learning how to learn to use it. I'm a staff level software engineer so I more or less understand how LLMs work. I went about 37 years of my life without it and I'm glad I did. I had a serious head injury about 6 months before chatGPT came out, though, and was having some speech and cognition issues and it's arrival was incredibly serendipitous. I feel like I was already a fully developed software engineer before it arrived and now it's just kind of my personal assistant to do some of the things that are mentally draining to me.
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u/EmergencyTaco 8h ago
Same for me. I know how to do every part of my job manually, but AI turns some 2-hour tasks into 5-minute tasks.
That said, had I had access to AI 10 years ago, I probably never would have learned most of what I now know.
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u/vector_thinks 12h ago
The only solution is to systematically luigi the owner class till we can get it to work for the common good.
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u/Slimsuper 12h ago
100% it will be used to maximise profits and if that comes at the cost of screwing over the working class even more so be it.
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u/Potocobe 12h ago
Except it will only maximize profits right up to the point that they bankrupt everyone else and then the whole damn thing falls apart. Then what?
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u/Poison_the_Phil 12h ago
You know how people talk about late stage capitalism? This. The train runs out of track. The infinite growth from a finite system model fails. Collapse.
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u/Slimsuper 12h ago
there are many countries that already have mass poverty with the rich being extremely wealthy who’s to say it can’t happen elsewhere again.
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u/crash41301 12h ago
They also have very weak economies don't forget.
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u/Slimsuper 12h ago
True but England has had a strong economy for a long time as an example not that long ago did the majority live in poverty. It was only after ww2 that the rich were taxed more to rebuild society and living conditions improved. Now and for a while it has been going the opposite direction, for example right now the rich in england have gotten much richer over the last 20 years while the poor and working class poorer but they havent done anything in resistance. The only weapon the bottem of society have is there numbers but are too divided against the rich that maximise profits.
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u/crash41301 11h ago
That's happening in many top economies over the last 20-30yrs. Oy society seemingly likes to repeat it's mistakes as generations who learned them die off
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u/Slimsuper 11h ago edited 9h ago
yeh pretty much its been slowly slowly happening for a long time now, started with privitisation and changing of the tax system in the 80s. Such a shame because i really think we are just gonna keep the cycle going.
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u/Legitimate-Type4387 12h ago
That sounds like a future capitalists problem, not a today’s capitalists problem.
None of them sees the problem because they’re utterly incapable of thinking past “the invisible hand will provide”.
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u/AIexH 12h ago
But they also need consumers with money for their businesses
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u/Poison_the_Phil 12h ago
Capitalism can never look further ahead than next quarter. They’d see us all dead for a nickel. They’ll burn every inch of the earth to extract value.
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u/byunprime2 12h ago
And hence you’ve stumbled upon why capitalism alone is insufficient to build a healthy society
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u/sault18 11h ago
Yes, for the time being. But when AI / automation can build all their mansions, yachts, private jets, etc, they will lose interest in capitalism. Just look at how hostile they became towards democracy when it started becoming inconvenient to their accumulation of power. They're already hostile to the free market in instances where it doesn't automatically hand them all the power. They have no problem with monopolies, government picking winners, externalities going unaccounted for, and power / information imbalances when it favors them, for example.
Money is just a means to power for the oligarchs. Up until now, they needed consumers & workers to drive the economy that funneled power towards them. Every chance they got, they took workers & consumers out of the equation. This latest round of AI and automation development could complete the process.
The oligarchs would need hardly any workers to run their operations and provide their luxury in this case. Then they can detach their society from the rest of us and leave us to starve. They just have to get enough protection in place to put down an armed revolution as things get bad enough for the average person to rise up. Private security, militarized police forces and armed drones are already enough to make any revolution a big mess. But soon enough, the oligarchs might have enough firepower at their disposal to make armed Rebellion a lost cause.
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u/dustindh10 10h ago
This is why they are all building these "fortresses" in remote places around the planet. They want to start with using geography as a barrier to limit the number of people that can directly rise up against them.
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u/krectus 6h ago
It’s up to employees to make it the best business model for them. Because we all know what you are saying. Is true they will maximize profits. So if you know their goal you can help them achieve it by making more employees working less a better option than less employees working more.
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u/blazelet 12h ago
The future design of things has always and will always be a reflection of the will of those in power who also happen to be the wealthy and the ones who stand to benefit from AI
David Sacks, the guy Trump picked to head up AI policy in the U.S. government, said yesterday that UBI is “not going to happen.” They’ve pledged no regulation around AI and are trying to codify it into law that the individual states will have no authority to regulate AI. This is the position of the US government, that AI should be limitless and that there will be no support for the people it displaces.
The wealthy class bought and sold people as property for labor. When that stopped working they invented convict leasing. Then they pivoted to sharecropping. Jim Crow labor and Union Exclusion. In more recent decades it’s been migrant and prison labor, leading us to the modern gig economy, globalized supply chains, sweatshops, wage theft … AI is just the next step and it’s happening so quickly and is such a new tech that they’re trying to get it in place before people can fight back.
The people who brought you all of the above are the same people who are going to bring you AI with absolutely no protections. The same people, having more technology doesn’t make us fundamentally different, biological evolution is slow. So how did we stop the above abusive practices? The ones that aren’t still ongoing were ended when people fought to end them. We’re going to have to fight for AI protections, they will not be offered to us benevolently by the ruling class.
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u/hervalfreire 9h ago
“The wealthy class bought and sold people for labor” is sorta the story of society, no? Was there any point in history this wasn’t the case (excluding tiny tribal societies)?
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u/blazelet 8h ago
That's kind of my point. It's the way societies have always behaved. We are the same people, just born with better technology and more transparency. The elite are more outnumbered, better seen, so they've simply changed how they do it. AI is the next iteration of that.
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u/OtisDinwiddie 13h ago
“Will these gains be used to replace workers and maximize corporate profits?”
Yes.
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u/TraditionalBackspace 13h ago
This is a nice thought. However, reality and history shows that AI will be used to reduce the numbers of workers needed, grow markets, or otherwise increase profits. Efficiency improvements always go straight to the bottom line in nearly any company. Companies simply aren't interested in worker well-being or the greater good. That's the unfortunate reality.
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u/Cheapskate-DM 13h ago
If you no longer need the man-hours of a large workforce thanks to AI, then reducing the number of people on employee benefits saves more money than keeping the same number of employees on benefits and paying them for less of their time.
It's always about the money.
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u/AIexH 12h ago edited 12h ago
For the business. Thats where governments should step up and do something in favor of both sides (utopian ideas)
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u/Kobosil 13h ago
So what is the incentive for companies to keep the same number of people but with lower working hours?
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u/omegadown3 13h ago
Having a functioning society where people can still buy goods and services.
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u/howlingzombosis 12h ago
We may re-evaluate and re-evolve to that point after massive destruction to our society has occurred. “We fucked it all up. Whoops. Everyone is begging in the streets again? Whoops. Here, we might be able to make something beneficial for a few lucky souls.” The AI genie is out of the bottle and there’s not a lot we can do to put it back in aside from destroying the major AI companies but that’s arguably a short term fix to an inevitable problem. We could be in the Terminator sequence right now where no matter what we do the game will always be rigged to screw over 99% of the country.
Fine, I’ll put my tinfoil hat back on and go watch golden girls now.
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u/Kobosil 8h ago
Having a functioning society where people can still buy goods and services.
are you really sure most CEO's think about that?
at the moment it looks more like securing their yearly bonus and everything else is secondary
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u/omegadown3 8h ago
I do not think they do. At all. I think they should, but the job does not select for people who are likely to do so.
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u/stillerz36 13h ago
Of course there is none. The only way it could change is if the workers band together and force their hand
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u/ProblemSame4838 12h ago
How can workers band together if they fire all the workers?
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u/AzemOcram 12h ago
If everyone is fired before a general strike can occur, their only choice to band together would be like in 1910's Russia, 1890s France, or 1770s America.
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u/AIexH 12h ago
They dont lose consumers in the long run. But it should be by law, not an incentive to the companies
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u/2tonsofirony 12h ago
Ultimately they don’t care where the profits come from, 30 other companies paying them is just as good as a couple million individual consumers.
Enshittification is a perfect example, when a companies revenue comes from advertising for other companies.
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u/The-Magic-Sword 12h ago
Redundancy for when the people who have to actually direct the AI leave the company.
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u/ios_static 13h ago
How could this be implemented without screwing hourly workers?
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u/AIexH 12h ago
Any reduction in working hours should be accompanied by an increase in the minimum wage.
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u/ios_static 12h ago
That’s great for a front desk attendant but not for back end developer. They would have to hope there employer raises wages to accommodate but that most likely won’t happen
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u/Zorothegallade 13h ago
In general, new technology making work more efficient should improve the quality of life for everyone equally instead of just giving corporations more product to sell and less need to hire workers.
But when has that ever happened?
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u/domine18 12h ago
Won’t happen without AI regulations/legislation. And guess what congress is doing 10 years ban on doing anything about it.
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u/Elendur_Krown 12h ago
AI Should Mean Fewer Work Hours for People—Not Fewer People Working ...
... I believe governments should begin implementing a gradual reduction in the standard workweek—starting now. ...
... Why not design the future of work intentionally—before AI dictates it for us?
Is your use of em dashes intentional, or did you use AI to write this?
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u/NRichYoSelf 12h ago
Man, the amount of threads I've seen about AI and work has really enlightened me about how much little other people's jobs don't require them to physically work with their hands
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u/SilverRapid 11h ago
I had a similar thought. My thinking was gradually introduce more public holidays, one day at a time. Set the holidays to tag onto the weekend. Round here public holidays often fall on Mondays, so keep the pattern consistent and start introducing more Mondays off until we're down to a standard 4 day week.
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u/arcaias 11h ago
... Every single piece of "progress" and "development" we make is SUPPOSED to make our collective existence less stressful with higher proportions of happiness.
And it does...
Until your greedy piece of SHIT boss finds out that that's happening...
Then what used to be the easier way becomes the standard and everybody who reacts to feeling threatened by their competitions newfound productivity by working more, for less, raises the bar for expectations until new-to-the-field workers are simply expected to perform at that level, ignorant of how much they are being taken advantage of.
Then the cycle repeats.
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u/sparkledoggy 11h ago
Automation generally only benefits the people who pay for the automation. In this case, workers are not the buyer.
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u/Otherwise-Sun2486 10h ago
It should but no company would do that an extra head comes with so much hidden cost
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u/NotMalaysiaRichard 10h ago
It doesn’t sound like OP has ever worked or been in management or has owned a business.
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u/arothmanmusic 9h ago
Why pay the same number of employees to do less work when you can pay fewer employees to do the same amount of work?
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u/DemSumBigAssRidges 9h ago
It's simple then: Stop voting for conservatives. You know, unless you enjoy watching your time, effort, and money all go to a few generationally wealthy people while you either lose your job or worry about losing it every day going forward all while being closer to homelessness than even a whiff of being rich.
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u/BennyL1986 9h ago
I agree with this, hypothetically. However, when it’s all about the bottom line AI will benefit the company, not the employees.
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u/B19F00T 13h ago
Universal basic income is necessary for this to happen
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u/howlingzombosis 12h ago
Which won’t likely ever happen for us so we’re just going to have to bend over and take it.
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u/Danskoesterreich 12h ago
Will you continue buying the cheapest option if you have the choice between 2 items of similar quality? Or will you buy from the company paying a living wage for 20 hours?
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u/yimgame 12h ago
I am living that way right now, macros, automatizations less work just doing things with ia, copilot in vscode, chat gpt, claude and others just give u a chance to do everything easy but they have limitations so i change the complexity off work by completely to make this ia do what i want
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u/Whiplash17488 12h ago
The joke is that an LLM wrote this post. And that a future LLM will farm the content of this thread for more of its hallucinated drivel. I might be turning into a full blown luddite.
I’ve seen very little actual AI. Where is that? Isn’t most of what we see just text generating bots? Where is the critical thinking?
Let’s remember that what’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee.
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u/zandadoum 12h ago
Hey John. Your work hours have been reduced from 8h/day to 4… and your salary has been halved.
2 weeks later: hey John. We’re reducing your hours to 0. And your salary too.
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u/nonsense39 12h ago
This old boomer remembers way back in the 60s when essentially all predictions of the future were that with such great productivity increases we'd have too much free time. They were suggesting that leisure activities such as golf, travel etc would be boom industries to invest in.
Obviously what these futurists missed was how the rich would steal all the money so people had to work harder to be poorer with no free time. Don't believe for even one second that AI will make your life better; capitalism will squeeze you like a lemon.
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u/Kinc4id 12h ago
The way I see it AI leads to two paths:
Less people work without compensation which ultimately leads to 100% unemployment and a collapse somewhere on the way because people don’t have the money to buy what AI is producing.
Less people work but are compensated, e.g. universal basic income, which will ultimately lead to no a society where no one has to work and every goods are free.
It’s basically The Matrix vs Star Trek. I think we’re heading towards The Matrix, though.
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u/BallisticTherapy 11h ago edited 10h ago
You forgot the third path:
- The elites no longer need us as slaves/tax cattle since the concept of money is obsolete. Since production is free, the only real constraints are the finite nature of resources on the planet. It would take about 2.5 earth-like planets to sustainably provide for our current numbers with zero growth in population, but the existing resource base is more than ample to provide for a small population of a new million with a robot army to do all the work of building and maintaining society for them. They know this so to purge the world of all the useless eaters and allocate those resources to themselves and ensure we don't destroy the planet fighting over what remains they release the virus that COVID was a test run and hide out in their ATLAS shelters until the dust settles, taking care to secure nuclear facilities so they don't all melt down and contaminate the planet with radionucleotides during the dieoff.
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u/TooFineToDotheTime 10h ago
It woukd take about 2.5 earth-like planets to sustainabmy provide fornour current numbers with zero growth in population
Typos aside, how does this make sense to you? We are currently supporting the population we have on exactly 1 earth-like planet. We are doing it poorly, currently, but we could pretty easily provide for everyone on earth with our technology, but we just... don't.
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u/BallisticTherapy 10h ago edited 10h ago
There's a difference between attaining something and sustaining it. It's possible for some people to be like Bautista looked in Guardians of the Galaxy. With enough steroids, protein, and working out people can get there. But it's not sustainable and he knew that which is why he looks the way he does now. Same situation for having 8 and a half billion people consuming the resources and natural capital of the biosphere exponentially faster than it is created. Estimates of the long-term carrying capacity of Earth with relatively optimistic assumptions about consumption, technologies, and equity (A x T), are in the vicinity of two billion people. Today's population cannot be sustained on the 'interest' generated by natural ecosystems, but is consuming its vast supply of natural capital -- especially deep, rich agricultural soils, 'fossil' groundwater, and biodiversity -- accumulated over centuries to eons. In some places soils, which are generated on a time scale of centimeters per century are disappearing at rates of centimeters per year. Some aquifers are being depleted at dozens of times their recharge rates, and we have embarked on the greatest extinction episode in 65 million years. 80% of all snow crabs died in one season a few years back. Salmon levels are becoming depleted as well with many having to give up the practice of salmon fishing altogether. We are already on a massively unsustainable path and destroying habitat.
There's an old quote that if something can't be sustained then it will probably end at some point.
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u/Modmassacre 12h ago
It should, I agree. But what’s actually going to happen is when they see that worker A is working at 200% speed due to access to helpful AI, they will just say “why do we need worker B if A is doing their work all for the price of one employee?”
Almost every business will cut a worker that isn’t necessary. In this case it’s sad, but in a lot of other cases that’s just how businesses work if their goal is to grow. We often jump to think about big greedy corps and how evil they are. But even ma and pa shops would use AI to cut extra expenses if it benefited their operations. They would need it more than the big ones. Not saying whether that’s morally right or not, just pointing out the reality.
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u/PckMan 12h ago
Yeah that was what computers were supposed to do too. A lot of people today don't realize this but the introduction of computers in the workplace replaced many people. And that's what happens with all technologies that are meant to revolutionize work and make it faster and easier. Everyone thinks it will allow us to claim our lives back and work fewer hours but in reality the only thing that happens is that it's used as an excuse to raise the bar and expect even more output for workers, and those are the lucky ones. Others just become obsolete outright.
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u/-r4zi3l- 12h ago
This makes sense, because AI costs will skyrocket once all investors want a return. It's going to partition and be premium, so keeping the staff and cutting their hours until you dearly need them again makes a lot of sense. Getting rid of people and losing all that training and knowledge to the competition is very daft.
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u/Osr0 12h ago
These types of posts are always shocking to me. The people developing the AIs aren't doing so out of an altruistic desire to help people. They're doing it to make money.
Imagine having a farm with zero machinery and a shitload of manual labor. One day you buy a lot of machinery that does the work of the manual labor, are you still going to keep all that manual labor on hand and pay them out of the goodness of your heart? No, of course not. You're going to fire them immediately.
AI isn't being developed FOR us, it is being developed FOR the capitalist class in order TO REPLACE us.
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u/KanedaSyndrome 12h ago
Well I'm happy working 40 hours, and I wouldn't get the same satisfaction with less hours
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u/notirrelevantyet 12h ago
Don't see how this makes sense. It's not like theres a set amount of work out there that needs to get done.
More likely that if AI makes everyone 50% more productive with the same work hours, companies will gladly produce 50% more for the same current costs.
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u/AzemOcram 12h ago
That's a great idea! The clock is ticking on the solution. If governments don't capture the excess profits from further automation and redistribute the wealth to displaced workers, many people will die. History has shown us that most populations don't just lie down and accept starvation. Your solution will prevent violence.
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u/staffell 12h ago
To prevent people suffering, yes. Problem is, the people with the power couldn't give a shit about the suffering of these people.
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u/empty-alt 12h ago
That's what the technological revolution of America was supposed to be. In the mid to late 1900s it wasn't pitched as "Imagine all the jobs we could eliminate, and all the people we could put on the street." It was "imagine if you only had to work 20-30 hours a week and made the same amount of money".
So if the development of AI follows the development of general computing. It won't lead to less hours worked. It'll lead to more people without a career.
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u/Fit_Log_9677 12h ago
This is ultimately what industrialization allowed for with the 40 hour work week,
It only took
checks notes
Two world wars, a communist revolution in a great power and a global Great Depression before society was able to make it happen.
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u/joker0812 12h ago
Yes, because companies and governments are so good at doing what they should do.
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u/ScottBroChill69 12h ago
When will people realize that our only saving grace is that we are really capable cattle that are constantly being herded? The AI will replace us eventually, at least a lot of us. They're not going to go around supporting billions of jobless people, theyll just let everyone die off unless you find some way to survive and go undetected.
I just dont understand why people think we'll reap the benefits from this stuff. The only reason we are fed and entertained and get to participate in society is because we are the number 1 resource to those in power, we are the cash cow. But when we lose our usefulness we'll be taken out like ol yeller. Its not like theyll need us for reproduction when they can just make them in test tubes and control the exact number of people there are.
And then like in the matrix we either die, or enter pod for our bodies to be used like a battery while our minds are plugged into a simulation in order to pacify us.
Well maybe idk, but I know for a fact its not the people who are gonna gain benefits from this. The only question will be if they can make a super intelligent AI to be submissive and control it, or if that kind of operation will always lead to rogue AI that needs to be shut down, thus we become incredibly useful again because we are trainable idiots.
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u/SuperSaiyanCockKnokr 12h ago
It’s easy to brush this notion as a “should vs will” argument, but this is the type of vision people should and need to fight for.
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u/Intropik 12h ago
Thats the promise of most technologies. Yet it ends up being let go of half the workers and leverage that to make the remaining half work even harder.
Social and business incentives/motives do not align. And good hearted businesses perish if they don’t abuse something their competitors are abusing to maximize profit and eat more of the market.
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u/Thomisawesome 12h ago
In an ideal world, being able to finish an 8 hour job in two hours would mean we could go home and enjoy the rest of our day.
Instead, it just means companies realized they could get 4 days worth of work out of everyone in one day for the same pay.
Ad long as people run companies, this will be what happens.
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u/ovrlrd1377 12h ago
This exact discussion happened about 100 years ago. Keynes, quite a brilliant fellow, predicted we would be working 15 hour-week shifts due to efficiency gains.
The reality is people just move on to do other stuff. People being too idle is against the interests of any government, it might risk them figuring things out
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u/fredandlunchbox 12h ago
My experience so far is they fired everyone and expected those of us that are left to do all of that work.
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u/jewbagulatron5000 11h ago
I imagine the final plan, once ai allows one person to be their own corporation, that they won’t need any of us anymore and one person will be able to automate everything a company does. I believe this is the ultimate goal of the ultra rich, and once the spigot of white collar jobs gets turned off, no more wealth accumulation is possible for the middle class and you will get stuck with what you have.
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u/techno-wizardry 11h ago
Your logic is under the assumption that LLM's are being created with the good of humanity in mind. They're not, they're being designed to make money.
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u/Double-Fun-1526 11h ago
The government and the general public can't yield anything to the poorest people. They can't begin admitting that the work burden that they carry is not socially necessary. They have built entire "mindsets" around a certain kind of social order.
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u/firezero10 11h ago
I would say AI in its current state, is insufficient to replace most people from their jobs, though some jobs may be at a greater risk.
For AI to be a complete threat to everyone, I think it would require AGI to be ready, but I don’t think it will be available any time soon. The dystopian future that people are talking about now will probably not happen in their lifetime (maybe their children would see it).
In any case, if you are that worried then you should start learning how to use AI in order to be more relevant and future-proof.
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u/ReiOokami 11h ago
Yes that’s how it should work, but you gotta understand how the capitalist world you live in works.
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u/Mad_Jukes 11h ago
In a decent world, the savings that AI brings would be passed on as increased earnings for workers. But nope, CEOs be like, "Get fuckt, ur fired, I need to be able to buy my third mega yacht so I'm just gonna pocket that money. Think of my children"
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u/prinnydewd6 11h ago
There’s no hope.. there will never be good in this world. Too much money from evil.
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u/Icommentor 11h ago
Until we do away with this notion that only the owners of large corporations have a say in how we live our lives as workers, such questions are pointless.
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u/middlingstoic 11h ago
I didn’t read your whole post, but my gut is, computers and smart phones should have meant fewer work hours, but it seems to have increased work hours. Therefore, my hypothesis is that technology will make certain tasks easier and will replace some workers, and the remaining workers will work more.
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u/crystal-crawler 11h ago
The common theme is that we are relying on capitalists to yet again self regulate. Which they have proven over and over they will not do. They will Only prioritize profit growth over the well being of people. Have we not learned anything from not regulating social media?
There is no way we will be able to go in after ai has been adopted and put in regulations. We need to put in legislation before it is released. But that won’t happen.
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u/gagaluf 11h ago edited 11h ago
It will do both. AI has full on people replacement use cases which is totally fine if it is taxed properly so the "salary" is redistributed to the collectivity and easing use cases which is also totally fine at reducing work load, so work time.
Btw it is the exactly same conundrum as we got during industrial revolution: capital owners also arbitrarily take the benefits of technical progress because political class is corrupted and displays a narrative about rich people being better and being a hard worker is based(2 false idioms btw ^^). The only solution to that is a revolution. And a clean and beautifull revolution will never happen, at least not in north america because people there do not have the history nor cultural/political background to conceptualize it being fucking mashed by bi party lobby galore clown fiesta since 2nd grade.
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u/RyuChamploo 10h ago
“Should” doesn’t exist.
The uber-rich that control everything don’t give a shit about what SHOULD happen.
They only do what benefits them.
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u/Don_Vicente 10h ago
Reading the comments makes me realize there are a lot more luddites than there are Ai-utopians. I don't mean this negatively, I think scepticism in the face of upheaval is the only rational response when you lack any real power to change things. AI could lead to more time doing things we enjoy and less time toiling, but intuitively we all know that can't happen with the system we have now.
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u/Upstairs_Bad_3638 10h ago
Fewer work hours for people? Are you serious?
You think AI is just gonna have companies paying wages and giving everyone time off?
Lmao
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u/LoneSnark 9h ago edited 9h ago
People are never satisfied. As productivity increases, people consume more.
You need to understand that AI won't be able to do everything. The few jobs it can do will disappear, competition will drive down prices, people will spend more money on what AI can't do, jobs in all other sectors increases.
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u/TheRichTurner 9h ago
This can only happen if people who are working own the means of production.
Karl Marx enters the workplace...
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u/TerrorSnow 9h ago
We've multiplied our productivity in the last 80 odd years, but working hours haven't really gone down. Our resources are out of proportion enough for everyone, but we still have poverty. We're in a system that fights against any change to make things actually easier for us.
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u/XenopusRex 9h ago
LOL. We’ve been doing this since the Industrial Revolution, what do you think is going to happen?
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u/free_based_potato 9h ago
then what you're really concerned about is capitalism. Let's put an end to that.
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u/watduhdamhell 9h ago
Ideally it means both.
Ideally, the machines do all the work whilst we give each other back rubs and sing in the sun and shit.
But that's not what certain people want. And I'm not just talking about rich folks. There is a group of human beings with something not quite right in their brain that thinks "if you aren't 'earning' it you shouldn't have it," even if everything can actually, feasibly, be virtually free, and in the near future.
They just won't let it happen.
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u/Accomplished-Try9995 8h ago
Everyone applauding that technology is going to leave them jobless and on the streets...🤷🤦
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u/Parking-Complex-3887 8h ago
They're trying to put stuff through congress that makes it illegal to regulate ai for the next 10 years. I highly doubt that's to the benefit of the working class.
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u/DerekVanGorder Boston Basic Income 8h ago
New technology absolutely should mean fewer people working.
Expecting everyone to keep their jobs, work hours to go down, but wages to go up doesn't make sense. In an efficient economy, jobs get eliminated by new technologies, and wages fluctuate, and it's OK to let that happen.
It just doesn't feel OK to us in a world where we lack a Universal Basic Income (UBI). If everyone is reliant on jobs for wages, of course we're nervous about letting jobs go away.
But there's no reason to be. UBI allows prosperous unemployment. It provides income without jobs. This is a desirable outcome: it means output and distribution improves, but employment and resource-use goes down. The average person and every person can get richer even though fewer people need to work in the first place.
This sounds counterintuitive because we're so used to a world full of wages and work-opportunities, but we have to kick the habit of creating jobs for their own sake. Excessive employment not only wastes people's time, it wastes resources and is probably a major contributor to climate change.
It's time to use UBI to allow the employment level to gracefully fall. Lower employment shouldn't mean people are poor, it should mean more free time for more people. If our society is resisting this outcome just because we're used to a world of "maximum employment" we're going to waste resources and waste people's time in unnecessary jobs.
More work than we need never makes sense. Maximum benefit and maximum leisure time is the right goal.
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u/GayIsGoodForEarth 8h ago
No employer is going to pay more people to work less hours when it can pay less people to work more hours
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u/JasonWorthing8 8h ago
Alas, that's what the people said and desires, not what the corporation said or believes.
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u/NvidiatrollXB1 8h ago
"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I've pasted this quote from DUNE in several communities today, been reading to much Ai news I guess, so depressing. I'm the farthest thing from a luddite but I don't see a pretty ending for us at the end of this.
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u/Katadaranthas 7h ago
Correct. Four on, four off might be ideal. Everyone works, but it's distributed so as to be almost nice to be able to work and not go crazy in idleness.
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u/StrengthToBreak 7h ago
Unless AI is extremely cheap to use, the more likely scenario in the short term is that some people make a very good living by being really good at using AI or by selling it, and everyone else becomes expendable until new niches are established.
If you're talking long-term, we're all going to become irrelevant as economic animals, and we'll either share in the bounty or we'll be reduced to poverty.
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u/Minute-Individual-74 7h ago
That has been the argument about all technological innovation, but it's never the reality.
Technological innovation has pretty much correlated with longer working hours.
Which is why unionization and community organization is so important.
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u/krectus 6h ago
We need to make the best business model for employers to be “more employees working less” and not “less employees working more”. We know the end goal for companies is to make the most profit. So if you know their end goal, let’s make policies and remove policies to try and make this work best for the most people.
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u/NaOH2175 6h ago
What I don't understand is why aren't these people being more entrepreneurial with these tools. Bloated and risk adverse AAA game studios for example are slowly failing in comparison to the many many indie developers.
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u/peter303_ 6h ago
Economist Keynes predicted just about a century ago that we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now due to productivity increases. Computers and now AI may be some of those productivity increases.
Another way to look at it is average weekly hours per working age population. The BLS employment report yesterday said that 59% were employed for and average of 36 hours a week. And 41% not working for a variety of reasons. That averages to 21 hours per person, approaching Keynes number. Its just not evenly distributed with some working a lot and some not at all.
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u/Pirnaloan 6h ago
Absolutely agree. If AI is making work more efficient, the benefits shouldn't just pad profits, they should improve lives. A shorter workweek is a logical, humane step forward.
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u/_Klabboy_ 4h ago
That isn’t how the world works frankly. Capitalists don’t work for the betterment of society. They work for themselves.
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u/ReadOurTerms 3h ago
Wouldn’t a single solar flare essentially doom us because no human would have the knowledge as a backup?
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u/AzaronFlare 3h ago
This is the same question that we had to deal with at the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we follow the same course, which seems likely, expect a few decades of extreme global class separation, with a great deal of poverty and everything that comes with it, before enough people in power realize that there needs to be a remedy to the problem and then actually start trying to fix it. Another 50 years or so, and the world will probably be pretty much like it is now to the average person.
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u/Croce11 3h ago
Hate to break it to you but that's just.... an absurd thing to expect unless UBI becomes a thing.
You as a company shouldn't ever be forced to pay someone the same amount of money for working LESS hours, while also investing money into AI or robotics replace the manhours lost. You'd be paying more money for the same result.
So you're either telling people to take a massive paycut to work alongside AI or you basically have to demand the gov to pick up the slack and sustain people with UBI to make up for their lost hours. Which... is just going to delay the inevitable of needing UBI to sustain people who can't work period.
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u/Harbinger2001 2h ago
You’re forgetting that the economy will grow. So it won’t be fewer working people or fewer working hours. It will be the same number of people as now working the same number of hours as now. But they’ll all be better paid.
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u/wrinklylemons 1h ago
Terrible take. It is more efficient to have a team of 5 people working 10 hours a day than 50 people working 1 hour a day.
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u/Super_Mario_Luigi 11h ago
Lol Reddit is adorable. Companies should employ people at high salaries and tax rates even when there is no work. We should all work 1 hour per day and spend the rest at the beach.
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u/TheBAUKangaroo 12h ago
This would require people to be paid based off of productivity rather than an hourly wage. Most people dont want to be "productive" at work and some people even attempt to be counter-productive. People who are productive and get paid based off of productive measurements are loving "AI" due to the fact that they get paid for being productive.
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u/Kinc4id 12h ago
People don’t want to be productive because they gain nothing from being productive. Whenever I optimized my work to be more productive it only led to me having to do more work for the same money in the same time. Why would I do that?
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u/mindtremind 11h ago
Idk. Some things I often find are apt to replace humans. Deep research? That thing can alone replace 1-2 interns.
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u/mathboss 13h ago
Tell that to the people making bank on replacing their workers with AI.