For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working.
An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025.
Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director’s prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself.
However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.
Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent “crisis meetings”, working on weekends, and “super cut-throat” performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go.
“You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren’t broken,” the person said.
Increased productivity from better tooling has never equated to less working time. Increased productivity from better tooling always results in more working time, because now you can “produce more”. The only exception is farm stuff for small producers. The big land owners can now use more land thanks to better tools.
As with all inventions, the 40 hour workweek lie remains while 60+ hour weeks continue. I do more work, get paid the same, and am expected to work even harder. The machine must grow
It takes a lot of man hours to achieve the AI productivity boost the CEO told us we’re getting.
It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day.
Haha, that’s not how it works. One of my teachers used to say “Computers made our jobs easy but then they started to give more work to us.”
Know this without ambiguity, it will never be enough for them. The point is to always push you to broken and then replace you without remorse.
it’ll never be enough because they’re only focused on themselves, like both red and blue magas do.
Oh they meant less work for them. Not for us peons, that would be silly.
How do you get less work from zero work? Does it underflow and rolls back to maximum work?
Tbh I’ve never met someone who claims they work north of 70hpw who actually does.
I don’t believe for one second that tech leaders have never heard of the lump of labour fallacy
In my current project Copilot saved extreme amounts of work for knowledge transfer session planning and creating documentation, technical role description, interview questions for staffing, RAID notices, drafting complex emails, and so on.
And did you get to go home early because of the saved time?
Anyone who isn’t clearly working 2 physical jobs claiming to do 90h is a liar 99.9+% of the time.
This is also 2 discreet issues. I’m tired of this propaganda boss.
