Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935
Manager: You’re right! AI Makes me as productive as half my team, so I’m firing half of them AND working a 4 day work week!
Manager in two weeks:
Please come back, I can’t do all this myself!
Studies show productivity has a sharp drop off after 6 hours iirc
Mine starts badly, tails off a little in the middle, and the least said about the end the better, but other than that I always give 100%.
We should get a 4 day work week anyway even with reduced hours. It is fucking ridiculous people think that it is possible to do anything but the simplest tasks actively for 8 hours without breaks and be productive. People who think that are either stupid or have never spent a single second analyzing what they do in their day. Practically all companies already operate with their employees getting all work done within a few hours and lounging away with tiny bits of looking busy throughout the day. Might as well let them go home and rest so they can have higher motivation, clearer minds and more productivity. It’s a win win.
Hear hear!
Let’s make anything over 32 hours double pay.
4 days is kinda outdated, like how the $15 minimum is so long overdue it’s moot. 24 hours. 3 days working vs 4 days living. We deserve to live more than we work.
Absolutely agree. They wanna complain about entitlement. They think they’re entitled to 3/4 of all of our lives.
We could have done this 150 years ago when oil gave us 100 times more energy back than it took to extract it.
Humans are a defective species, we must see others suffer.
To be fair, we kinda did. Don’t get me wrong, workers are still heavily exploited now, but we’ve come a long way since then. At least we have minimum wage and some degree of workers rights now, even if we still have a way to go.
Hopefully this current productivity boom can continue to push us along that path without driving us further into techno dystopia.
Nah it’s just that the socio-economic system we’re stuck with that literally incentivizes ghoulish behavior that causes suffering. Change the system, change humanity.
I think you may have cause and effect inverted.
Well yes, ghouls were the ones who invented capitalism, but before that we had feudalism, which was even more ghoulish - but guess what, we don’t go around drawing and quartering criminals anymore, so it looks like I’m right. Change the system, change humanity.
Nah, we just change the methods, the underlying mechanism is the same. For example, you need to win so you wrote “looks like I’m right”, instead of clobbering me. But that innate human need to triumph over the other is still there.
If AI is so productive, we should have Unuversal Basic Income, and free college/vocational education for anyone who wants it.
America? Educating their population? For free??
No, no, no. They’ll just make it so that each of us is expected to do more since AI is “helping” us. Success under capitalism just leads to more work. The number has to keep going up. If they get their arms twisted they may give us a day off, but they will absolutely decrease the pay. My fear is that they would also go, “Oh, well, since you’re not working 40 hours a week, even though it’s the same work, so no benefits for you 🤷🏿♀️.”
Meanwhile, in Germany: There are a lot of unemployed people, and there are a lot of people who want a four-day week, so what we desperately need is working longer hours.
?
Oh. I missed the sarcasm. But yes, that is how conclusions work in my country, as well.
Yeah, they just like squeezing out some more. Why should the efficiency gains of the last decades help the people, after all? No, what we really need is richer billionaires.
3-day by now. 4-day was due before AI, so why would this great boost not make the difference?
3-day week, baseline annual salary across the board of $100,000, free health care for all and capital asset tax of 95% over $50 million
Who’s with me?
The people.
I’m down for that. I could be satisfied with only $50 million.
But then they couldn’t pay 1/2 as many people as they used to while still expecting the same amount of work to get done.
Oh you sweet summer child. 1/2 as many people for double the amount of work
That’s cool and all but what about maximum salary hours?
Not enough people talk about this.
When I found out how that worked I was like
“Lemme get this straight…they get whatever they want out of you, as long as they want, exempt from overtime, for a flat yearly fee? But of course you get benefits and vacation time you are socially stigmatized from using…Yeah that’s a scam.”
What’s with the obsession with renting/owning people?!?
but then shareholders?
Fuck shareholders.
Ew
What?
It’s just gross is all. Don’t really want any of that shareholder action
I agree gross. But we can still eat them right?
It’s already cooked Bernie. It’s a charred dead carcass.
Fair, but the guys a politician - beating dead horses is too often just part of the job.
