4-day workweek and UBI, please.
Even when the progressives mention ubi it ALWAYS comes at the cost of removing all other social services like health care, low income housing, food stamps, social security. So imagine recieveing up to 5000+ dollars a month in benefits being taken away from you because the dumb majority is excited to get their 600-800 dollar a month bribe so that they can go yolo it all on so driven polymarket.
We need more social welfare not less. Trump already is gutting social welfare services to pump that money into ai.
The homeless don’t even get benifits now due to work requirements, and they can’t get a job because they don’t have a home. And RFK is talking about putting them in camps.
True UBI should replace those other services, because it should be a basic income that allows people to survive without a job. You shouldn’t need additional health care because we should have medicare for all. You shouldn’t need low income housing because your UBI should be enough to pay for a modest home. You shouldn’t need food stamps because UBI should cover it.
The fact that it’s always framed as “$600 bribe!!!” is infuriating and absolutely wrong, because that’s far from “basic.” “Basic” would mean enough to live on, without requirement.
Again in theory I want ubi, but as I see it, its a way to reduce benifits.
Maybe the more I think about it I don’t like it I’m not sure.
At its core ubi adds flexibility, and the ability for people to manage their resources at their own needs. At the same time that’s part of the problem. Already social security doesnt cover it, there’s people in their 70’s still working at Walmart and thats including disabilities, healthcare, and food stamps if they still receive all those. I think UBI is better for private corperations to step in and capture that money instead of trying to assure peoples needs are met.
I just don’t see how in the world we currently exist in how its going to work out. I feel like major structural change has to come first and we are better off with things like universal healthcare, state housing, etc.
That way it provides state/federal jobs. Often people critize goverment workers for being lazy, slow, and decently paid. I say yeah that’s the point. If we are facing job loss having a form of guaranteed employment is nice. And having some inefficiency is good, providing a work life balance and not expecting ai to 3x peoples work loads is good for society.
Welfare shouldn’t be this ai ran numbers maximizer for effiecency.
I don’t see why UBI has to remove the rest of social services. Feels like that would fit in the “More social welfare” bin.
I don’t need Bernie to fully understand AI before he continues advocating for the people. He also has enough of a track record to trust that he does not blindly believe the AI rhetoric, which is primarily pushed by the same Corpo types he usually rails against. I’d wager he’s also for adding guard rails and protections.
Its good to keep pushing for good things, despite whatever noise is going on. Perfect being the enemy of good has sidetracked many an effort. Like conservatives have had no problem taking their little victories over the years chipping away at rights before going full out fascist. We need little victories do push back too.
It doesnt have to remove all the social welfare programs but every single time its mentioned in a discussion that’s how its described to work. Not our discussions but think tanks, podcasts with politicians, news talking heads, etc.
Also if we keep losing the welfare services we have now due to ai, what makes you think suddenly they are going to be okay with adding more. Especially one of such massive scale to promise every single human cash money.
These people keep using the term effiecency as if welfare needs to be some profitable thing.
As a study of what these Ai people think we should look at asha sharma who used to hold a position at the Ai division at Microsoft, who recently took over as the lead for Xbox.
She is there to pretend they are doing compromise and working for the people, yet at the same time cannibalizing the product they are working on to further chase the all mighty ai dollar. Xbox game pass the cloud gaming service keeps hiking up prices, making ad tiers, and now adding 25 hours a month limit to how much you can stream. Xbox game pass is already doing the worst it has, and Xbox doesnt want to make game consoles anymore, meaning game pass is all they have. All that compute at the data centers is getting repurposed for Ai, leaving xbox to die on the vine. Potentially bringing down all the developers that it bought with it.
Asha sharma was recently asked to be apart of some federal reserve task force. If you ask me that sounds like she is going to be incharge of the same exact thing. Canabilizing the system she was meant to “help” and funnel those profits to ai.
And asha sharma is just the name that’s in my head right now, this is practically everyone on goverment, or the head of a buisness. When they talk about UBI, its not because they believe in some greater good, or want their companies to get taxed more to pay for it. No its because it benifits them in some way. The system is pay to win, and people can easily be manipulated into fucking themselves over because they don’t want to think two steps ahead.
A UBI would effectively enable a 4 day work week regardless.
I’m willing to work 4x 7 hour days. If you think about the last 30 years of computer enhancing productivity, we’re owed a lot!
Does nobody think about the managers?
/s
4x6 with 1 hour for lunch. 2 hour lunch break if I have to go to the office.
I work like a truck, so 4x4 would be appropriate.
I work like a piece of wood, so 2x4 is all I’m asking
And they’re really like 1.6x3.5
I work like a Dolly, 9 days a week 5 hours a day.
She would be so proud of you 🥹
Thank you, it was a long time since I shared this insightful graph. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Why not 3x 7 hour days if the productivity gains are that great‽
yeah other places like the netherlands already did 4 day weeks before AI. we can go further.
A human has something like 4-6 hours of good work in them per day and the balance should be on life rather than work so 3 days of max 6h could be a start.
Everything would work as is and better and we can adjust to less allocation
AI CEOs: How about a 0 day workweek (because we want to fire all you plebs)
Bless uncle Bernie, but the US is in no state to even consider this. It has installed capitalism as its king.
Stop giving AI more credit than it deserves. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolutionise industries, it’s going to keep spitting out verbose nonsense until we get bored of it.
Yeah but 4x8 workdays are gonna be just as productive as 5x8, if you factor in general mood improvements.
Using AI as a scapegoat is fine, i guess
Average Lemmy AI doomer
Im surprised there are still people down on this first step of the ladder you’re lingering on.
Even most AI pessimists these days agree its useful as a force multiplier, allowing one person to do a bit more work in a given time frame, while still maintaining that its not competent enough to entirely replace a human in all but the most fringe cases.
“Its useless and acheives nothing” is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
You can remain anti-ai while still being realistic that it can be useful.
Especially if you acknowledge that the product is not the root of the problem, the late-stage capitalist system its being built to serve is the problem.
It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.
Like any tool, the user plays a key role in the quality of the output.
Yeah but it’s also just kind of a shitty tool.
Thats a take, but if you pair that sentiment with what I just said it paints a funny picture.
Like if I went to the store and bought a cheap hammer and it breaks after a few swings it’s a shitty tool. No matter my expertise with said tool.
That analogy only works if the AI literally stops functioning after a few uses.
A better comparison would be a tool that performs badly when used for the wrong job or by someone who doesn’t know its limitations.
“Sometimes produces bad output” isn’t the same thing as “shitty tool.”
Which just feeds back into what I’ve already said. Shall we go around again?
Not really. The output of LLMs is massively increased global warming, increased prices of goods and services, decreased number of jobs, increased numbers of bugs in software, massive increase in wealth migration from poor to the rich, and increased surveillance. None of that has to do with the quality of the users. Just using it at all results in all of those things.
You’re confused, those things are the outputs out late-stage capitalism.
Both can be true.
Usually id agree but im not sure that really applies here.
- The cost of operating these machine learning systems is too high, and the benefit too low:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/
https://cybernews.com/ai-news/ai-token-human-salaries-automation-spending-tech-execs/
- The most productive thing the current generation of machine learning systems has done is fill the Internet with garbage:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1971683/ai-is-filling-up-the-internet-with-garbage-spam-sites.html
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/over-50-percent-internet-ai-slop
https://mashable.com/article/ai-generated-internet-era-already-here
- LLMs are real, AI is fake.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They’re looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there’s been so much recent hype about “AI” “escaping” its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It’s also why the Trump administration is all-in on “AI” development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.
The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won’t be a general artificial intelligence.
Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet’s worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.
Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.
And I haven’t even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.
Get correct.
Get correct while making dead arguments haha.
You’re treating the current resource cost as though it’s a fixed characteristic of AI, when cost per unit of useful output has been collapsing the entire time. Stanford found that the inference cost of GPT 3.5 performance fell more than 280x in about two years because hardware and algorithms continue getting more efficient all the time.
Total AI energy use still rose because we’re using vastly more of it, but thats obviously going to happen in an emerging market. If AI becomes 10x cheaper and more efficient while simultaneously becoming useful across millions more tasks, total consumption can increase even as the resource cost of doing any particular task falls dramatically, but efficiency will continue to improve as the technology develops.
Im not saying ‘its good that its using all this energy’, im saying dismissing it as doomed by its energy usage is short-sighted. Its not in its end form.
The other things you mentioned are all regulation issues stemming from a completely fucked political system, not fundamental issues with ai.
So what AI company can I invest in and start making money, today? Which one is a going concern with solid financials? Because I’m pretty sure none of them are actually making more money than they’re spending on electricity. Because this tech doesn’t work on a very basic level.
Maybe it will get better. But it’s been years and I haven’t seen it improve enough to be economically relevant.
I think it has some uses for people that can utilize it intelligently, but what what I’ve actually observed is it that it lets incompetent people look like they’re doing more work while making more work for others.
Yeah i’d definitely agree, but that’s not new. The equivalent 20 years ago would’ve been ‘google-fu’, but its the same with any tool, its only as good as the weilder.
Knowing how the google search engine worked and being able to utilize it to its full potential is not at all equivalent to vibe sloping.
Explain why.
I have no opinion on this conversation, i just wanna acknowledge your username and how it fit the conversation.
Possibly, but there’s no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I’ve seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I’ve also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.
Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it’s fans and critics.
Kinda makes sense that the people you see getting the most out of it aren’t particularly “impressive” when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Whether or not those workers will actually see any financial benefits out of it is a different question entirely.
middle-management
Trust me… middle managers using LLMs are not doing anything but throwing slop everywhere
What were they doing before?
The good ones? Nothing that benefits from LLMs and isn’t made worse by being slopped up.
Imo, they’re just doing the same shit slightly faster. Whether or not it has value is separate and mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Slop is a thought-terminating buzzword, you’re relying on it too heavily to make your point and it undermines you.
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Good yes finally! We need to burn the planet for modest productivity gains.
You looked at the amount of solar the world has implemented over the last couple of years to compensate though?
Or how fast a unit of work has been getting exponentially cheaper over very short spaces of time?
You’re not unreasonable in glancing at the situation and seeing Doom, dont get me wrong, but if you do more than glance there is a more positive picture forming.
Of course, political reform will be crucial or we’re fucked either way.
You can’t compensate for wantan abuse.
The alternative means for producing sufficient energy for a better standard of living than most of us are privileged enough to experience has been around for several decades now(much longer with caveats).
These decisions to not only continue to use fossil fuels but to accelerate the pace of ecological destruction in the name of “compute”, all the while failing to benefit or protect the rights of laborers, are purely political and always has been.
political reform will be crucial or we’re fucked either way.
Politics is the choice between a solarpunk or a cyberpunk present. It could be better today if we simply choose.
Agreed 🤷♂️
Oh, I think we both know the answer to that question.
when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
So business created inefficient ways of working then pat themselves on the back when they come up with an expensive shortcut?
Or you know, office processes are the problem.
The problem is that before we reach a compromise between usability, efficiency, fairness, and the jobs it will destroy, we’ll already be screwed…
If it’s so useful, then surely all these AI companies are making money, right? I’ll wait
What are you waiting for?
A product can be useful to its users while the companies providing it are still unprofitable because they’re spending enormous amounts on R&D, infrastructure and expansion.
This regurgitated, thought-terminating sentiment confuses utility with the providers current profit margin. Its fair enough to not understand how businesses operate but taking shots in the dark while not really knowing what you’re talking about isnt sensible.
“Its useless and acheives nothing” is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.
Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.
Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.
Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?
I suppose it’s useful for writing those reports that have to be written because financial rules, but no one ever looks at. Reduced quality in that area is acceptable because the chances any of the documents are ever going to be looked at are minimal, and if they are looked at, the work the AI did was probably good enough, even if it wasn’t to your normal standards.
I also have an office job and can tell you I have uses for it.
I don’t use it to produce anything, but where I am researching something and have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more which are then verified.
have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more
I sometimes use it for that too but imo that’s a downgraded replacement from asking a colleague or a more senior person.
The capitalist class has squeezed the workers so much that taking a step back and asking your peers can be seen as wasting time, but that’s when breakthroughs happened.
If your wondering why I use it, well I think big brother is probably watching so my use shouldn’t be zero. I would much rather have collaboration time
I use it rewrite work emails, that way I don’t have to put any thought into formatting or punctuation it’s just a stream of consciousness that then translates into a proper formatted email. But that is pretty much it.
If my private life I don’t use AI for anything, not because I have a particular hatred of AI, I just don’t have anything that can think that it could be used for.
If the technology suddenly became unavailable, I’d be absolutely fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea to become too reliant on AI anyway, it leaves you vulnerable to price gouging. I like to keep all my thinking inside my own brain where it’s free.
If you look at how exponentially cheaper individual units of work have become over the last few years there’s no real reason to worry about price gouging. Particularly when there’s still competition in the market, and open-source models.
Without those you’d have a point.
Im in a combined coding and marketing role so for me its a huge time saver. Far from perfect, but so am I.
Have any of the AI companies ever reduce their input output token prices I’ve always been under the impressive gone up. Not that I keep much of an eye on it.
You’re talking about the cost to the consumer, where I was talking about the energy cost of an individual unit of work by a given model, but they’re both relevant. The underlying energy cost of generating a token at a given level of capability has been falling as hardware and inference become more efficient. Those efficiency gains can feed through into lower token prices for users, but also a more capable model can often complete the same task with fewer tokens, fewer retries and less prompting.
So even if the headline price of a new frontier model looks similar or higher, the actual cost, both in energy and money, of getting a given piece of work done can still fall substantially. It’ll keep doing so too, its still in its infancy.
The chinese models are getting cheaper now that they have “flash” variants
That’s a pretty ignorant statement. It has, objectively, changed the world. It has changed how we look at healthcare, politics, the economy, news, social media, the law, and countless other industries. Wtf do you mean it’s not going to change anything? I’m not arguing for AI, but I’m frustrated at your head in the sand approach.
Wow, so if AI has changed all of these fields, there must be some AI company making money? …right? It must be super easy to make money with such powerful tech, so there would obviously be a lot of good examples. Right?
If employers are going to be dumb enough to use it, workers should be protected.
My workplace has hybrid system. 3 days in office and 2 days remotely.
It has shifted so, that people work their ass off during those 3 days using AI as much as possible and during those two remote days they just sit on their asses with a laptop running in the background, mouse jigger on.
A full screen PowerPoint/Google Slides also keeps your machine awake.
Yeah. Plugging in a USB device that you bought online is a risk, unless you have enough knowhow to analyse it first on your machine running a wm.
Safer mouse jigger is a small slow electric motor and some legos.
How paranoid are you if you test every USB device? OK got a new memory stick or keyboard. Gotta test it!
Plugging shit on your company laptop that you ordered from Amazon or Aliexpress is definate no no, unless you can be sure.
The company laptop isn’t mine, that makes it the perfect test environment!
We have mandatory biannual courses with a quiz on how not to be you. 😆
They really suck ass, but I see they have an actual function.
We only get a quiz that badly teaches you the very basics of how to start a fire. A lesson I learnt when I was about 5. They call it fire safety but its mostly just what does a fire need to burn.
Fuel, oxygen and an arsonist!
Any solutions for trackball mice?
A $2 Arduino Nano with mouse juggler code. Very easy to set up, and you know the exact code running on it.
I do have ES32-C6 chips laying aroung 🤔
Unfortunately, ESP32s aren’t compatible with HID input. You’ll want an Arduino Nano. They can act as a direct input device.
Though I wonder if you could get that to work as a BLE keyboard… That could be possible.
Duckduckgo did give me a github page for a ESP32 bluetooth mouse jigger. Not sure if compatible with ESP32-C6 because of the RISC-V. Had some issues. Thats why they are “laying around”
it’s kinda bringing a “0 hour work” week for a lot of people.
I don’t care if they bring 0 work day if they pay me universal income. I could learn full stack, draw, read books, open a company, etc. Now all I do is word, excels, and a tiny bit of incident response.
I went to college for spreadsheets.
Obligatory shoutout to read David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”.
It needs to bring a UBI with it.
Copy paste from another reply to a comment:
Even when the progressives mention ubi it ALWAYS comes at the cost of removing all other social services like health care, low income housing, food stamps, social security. So imagine recieveing up to 5000+ dollars a month in benefits being taken away from you because the dumb majority is excited to get their 600-800 dollar a month bribe so that they can go yolo it all on ai driven polymarket.
We need more social welfare not less. Trump already is gutting social welfare services to pump that money into ai.
The homeless don’t even get benifits now due to work requirements, and they can’t get a job because they don’t have a home. And RFK is talking about putting them in camps.
Oh that note, looking back, Andrew Yang might have been the best choice for a nominy in 2020.
Imagine if chatGPT came out and then the president of US, who fully understands the enshitification and rug pull model of Silicon Valley just slapped a huge VAT tax on it, or maybe forced companies to charge the real price.
Man Biden was such a bad choice in 2020
I’ll give you that on Biden but nuh uh on Yang.
On February 17, 2022, Yang announced the launch of a Web3 community whose membership token fees would be used to fund lobbying work on behalf of Web3, blockchain, and cryptocurrency interests on Capitol Hill.[64]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang
Ideologically, Forward is populist and reformist, and a representative of centrism in the United States. It considers itself to be the center within the American political spectrum, although the party has also been described as big tent or syncretic due to its unwillingness on holding any firm stances or positions,[4]
corpo dems gonna corpo
It‘s a shitty system if all you can do is hoping for the perfect president to fix everything while mega corps and billionaires are actively working to keep those guys out of office. You need a grass roots movement against billionaires, against lobbying and against presidential powers if you want a piece of that growing productivity cake.
UBI without price control is useless. Rent is just going to go up by that amount and same for utilities, food, etc.
That would be a profound lack of imagination on companies. Raising prices to cover costs make sense since all businesses will be affected in the same way equally, but to just do it because everyone has more money doesn’t, your competitor might just undercut you by keeping their prices the same, and then get all the profit.
Speaking of lack of imagination…
That assumes that everything isn’t either owned by monopolies, trusts, or even just companies all agreeing to hike prices
My sweet summer child…
Lol.
Have you seen how the real economy works? It works by creating monopolies, fixing prices, lobbying for public contracts and subsidies and moving everything into private equity.
Do you think landowners won’t leech every cent they can get away with?
landlords are to centralized, and too regulated to provide affordable services
4 day work week would be already possible if we didn’t use a sizable amount of our industry production to just make useless crap. It would be 3 days, if we abolished planned obsolescence and made thing repairable.
According to Bullshit Jobs it would be less than half the working hours if we just stopped doing those
I think he estimated we’d only need to work about 15 hours per week.
I don’t know if that’s a good quid pro quo. At least in Canada the labor is plenty busy and would work weekends for the overtime. The issue is pay and labor conditions at the lowest echelons. That includes kids coming out of universities. They have to lower their expectations because their lack of experience makes them comparable to an AI assistant. But how are they suppose to become experts?
Absolutely. The AI will only work 4 days a week after everyone is laid off.
“sorry, best we can do is 2 shit jobs 7 days a week. AI took all the good ones and we’re not sharing a fucking thing with you”
- billionaire scum
I honestly probably only actually do three days worth of actual productive work a week, the other two days are spent in meetings which are necessary because management like to change procedures on a bi monthly basis, just to show everyone how in charge they are.
*must
*2-day
I used to travel regularly to Germany, spains and France, for instance work on production sites and equipment there. The standard legal working week currently in France is 35 hours. Currently data shows on average US workers work 34 hours a week. To be honest, it’s not that far off from the 32 hours Sanders is suggesting in his legislation he is coauthoring
Did you think to ask/wonder why it’s exactly 1hr below 35?
The issue is that you have to work 38 to 40 hours a week to get full time benefits, so most Americans aren’t getting healthcare or vacation days at that level of employment, as they are considered “part time workers.”
Tying healthcare to employment in the first place needs to end.
It literally says for the same pay and benefits. You didn’t even have to read the article.
I was responding to the comment, not the article
That’s true, a very good point!
You’re missing an important distinction, though: in the US, health benefits are tied to full-time employment, and most places consider anything under 35 to be part-time. I’ve had several jobs that would force me to clock off if I was at risk of hitting that full-time threshold. I had times where I was struggling to make ends meet, but they wouldn’t let me work more. And, at least in my state, if you take on a second job, wages from the second job are taxed at a higher rate.
So 34 American hours and the benefits associated are very different from 35 French hours. Codifying the threshold for full-time employment at 32 hours instead will only benefit white collar workers. Everyone else will just get their hours cut even further and be driven further into poverty.
Basically, we really, really need to fix American healthcare before anything else, because until we’re on a single-payer system, most changes to labor law will fuck the most at-risk populations.
And, at least in my state, if you take on a second job, wages from the second job are taxed at a higher rate.
that doesn’t sound right…
the suggested withholding on second (or third) jobs is higher to make up for the fact that your first job’s withholding is usually based on it being your only income source. in the end, you’re taxed on your combined income, one job or three, it doesn’t matter.
Denmark made the 32-hour workweek standard and their GDP went up. The fact that other countries aren’t following suit is proof that the capitalists don’t even follow their own statistical models.
Uh, no we didn’t. I wish we did, though.
Every once in a while, some politician brings it up, but 37 hours is still the default.
