Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week
Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day workweek | TechCrunch
We should already be on a fucking 3 day with increased pay with how much productivity has gone up, instead we're just getting ass raped harder and harder while rich assholes keep getting richer and richer with no end in sight.
No, you don’t undestand 😡
One day I’ll be a billionaire too and I can be the one that ass rapes others 😎
I read the following sentence a day ago and it's stuck with me:
We europeans shouldn't laugh at the suffering of the American people, just because we get fucked in the ass with slightly more lube.
Inequity is a global issue.
Well yeah absolutely, answering as an European.
The issue is that it's so comfy for most they don't see any issue. Like at all.
12.2% of US workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Europe the lowest rate is Greece at 14.2%, but most other countries are much, much higher. Right-wing Hungary is at 21.8%. Bend-over-backwards-for-US-tech-companies Ireland is at 34%. The home of the bankers, Switzerland, is at 45%. No other European country is below 50%, and the biggest economies France is at 98%, Germany is at 80% and Italy is at 100%.
Europeans may not be fully satisfied with the balance of power between corporations and workers. But, it is doing so much better than the US.
with how much productivity has gone up
How has productivity gone up?
We should already be on a fucking 3 day
Are you aware how the 5-day work week happened? It wasn't something that workers just got when it started to make sense. There were literal street battles between striking unionized workers and cops. People were hanged by the government. It took decades.
If you want that change to happen, you need to form or join a union. Right now in the US only 12.2% of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. That's the 4th lowest in the OECD, with only Mexico, Costa Rica and Turkey lower. Canada is at 31%. Switzerland, one of the most right-wing countries in Europe is at 45%. Spain is at 80%, France is at 98% and Italy is at 100%.
Once people are covered by CBAs, the unions need to flex their power and go on strike.
Complaining on the Internet is not going to cause the situation to change.
“Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said. “You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I’m gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours.”
0% chance this wouldn't also come with a 20% pay cut.
Sure, but that's not what's being discussed. Sanders is saying people deserve a 4 day work week at full pay.
Anyone can negotiate a 4 day work week for a 20% paycut. That's not worth public figures time to discuss.
Except even with a 20% pat cut it might still be hard to get because any amount of personal time threatens your dedication to their profits.
If productivity increases by x% they are going to fire x% of the workforce and give the saved money to themselves.
Or more realistically, they fire x+5 percent, just to see if you work slaves can't be worked a bit harder.
Heck. This should have happened in the 80's.
It did, for a select few. Less than four days, even. You just had to be one of the finance sector aristocrats who laid claim to enough passive rents.
1880s. Industrial revolution.
I assume /s but seriously the 40 hour work week was 1940 so the eighties was four decades later. It was more than enough time and plenty of technological efficiency had come to pass. We should be doing round 3 at this point at least. I mean we are not that far from it being a century since.
We should've gotten a 4-day work week decades ago. Now it should be a 3-day work week at most and I'm being generous. The capitalists are always screeching about the low birth rate, but if people were working 3 days a week and making a decent living off that time, it would help the birth rate because then a household with two working parents could be scheduled on different days and alternate staying home with the child, plus have a shared day off every week.
Anyway, that's just a selling point to make to the capitalists. Whether or not it helps with the birth rate doesn't matter as much as the fact that we're owed shorter work weeks thanks to all the blood, sweat, and tears that labor has put into making the world as wealthy as it is now. What's the point of all this work if not to improve our standard of living? Technology making our lives better is hitting diminishing returns and now it's often not making our lives better or it's even making our lives worse.
The argument for a 4 day work week is that studies have shown it maintains the same level of productivity as a 5 day workweek, but it makes people happier, so it doesn't slow down the economy, but actually improves it. What's the argument for a 3 day work week?
My reading of their argument is that when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased. If we believe that recent increases make it so that we only need to work 4 days to maintain our current output, we should be owed 3 days because by the same logic long ago we should've dropped to 4.
I think the argument would be that the productivity gains that have happened since the 5 day work week was implemented means that if we want that same level of productivity then a 3 day work week would get that. It would be less productive then currently but the argument would be that a lot of that productivity is just going towards the profits of the companies through having to hire less people. Instead if you wanted to maintain current productivity with a 3 day work week you'd have to hire more people which is good with the amount of wealth transfer and inequality that's been happening.
Edit: not to mention how bad the job market has been recently as well.
studies pilot projects, and successful ones. Productivity is even higher.
https://autonomy.work/portfolio/uk4dwpilotresults/
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230319-four-day-workweek-trial-the-firms-where-it-didnt-work
https://www.sap.com/israel/blogs/the-four-day-workweek-paradox
Imagine being rich as fuck because you're working 6 days a week instead of still barely making ends meet.
George Jetson's work week was one hour a day, two days a week. That's what we were promised we'd get once everything was automated, not that Spacely Space Sprockets would make us work 60 hours a week and pocket all the extra productivity for themselves.
We as a species could have built a leisure society decades ago. The raw energy input of fossil fuels could have been wisely parceled out by a council of benevolent dictators, while we live under the domes and chase Jessica 7 on a monorail.
We should've gotten a 4-day work week decades ago
Then you should have burned down Chicago decades ago.
The 5 day work week didn't just happen because workers deserved it. It happened because they went to war.
Nah, the top 0.1% will just pocket 90% of the fruits of that extra productivity and the top 10% the remaining 10%.
The rest will either be fired or asked to do the part of the work those who were fired did for the same pay.
No, personal computers made us productive enough for a 4 day work week. We’re down to like 24 hours per week now. I think many would enjoy four 6-hour days, while others may prefer three 8-hour days. And a rare few might want to work two 12-hour shifts.
Honestly, there's probably a lot of people actually working these shorter weeks to get their productive work done but just being forced to sit at a desk for the full 40. Office Space's "15 minutes of real work each day" didn't come from no where.
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.
Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?
I'm a telecoms engineer and I see limited use cases in my role for AI. If I need to process data then I need something that can do math reliably. For document generation I can only reliably get it to build out a structure and even then I've more than likely got an existing document the I can use as a structure template.
Network design, system specification and project engineering are all so specific to the use case and have so few examples provided in public data sets that anything AI outputs is usually nonsense.
Am I missing some use cases here?
Also, if you do see productivity improvements from AI, why would you tell your employer? They want a 5 day working week but they know what they expect to be achieved in that week, so that's what they get.
Yes.
Document that code I wrote 7 years ago, suggest any security or efficiency changes. It's surprisingly adept at that.
Give me the changes to NixOS 25.05 configuration.nix to add wadroid. Fails with an error, paste the error back into prompt. Oh, you need these kernel modules that are no longer default as of 25.05 make this change. Different error paste it back, Make this one last change and then reboot. It works. I spent a total of 5 minutes on it. If I were just using Google and screwing around that might have been half a morning.
OBS is giving me a pixel resolution warning. AI: it's one of your cameras or some media you've added in an unsupported format. Give me a quick shell script to run through all of my media directories in this tree and convert all the MP4 video that's yuv720 to a supported format in new tree so I can swap them out in the end with no risk. 30 seconds later it's there. Yes, I can write that but I'm not going to have it done in 30 seconds. And if one of the files errors I just shove the error right back in the AI. I don't personally care why one in 50 images failed I just want them to be converted and I'm far enough along and Dunning Kruger scale that I honestly don't really care about what I don't know as long as I can learn a little more and still get the job done.
Give me a python script to go through a file full of URLs and verify the SSL key expiration dates. Have a variable for how far the future to alert and then slack me a message at 10:00 a.m. everyday which URLs and IPs are expiring earlier than that variable. Also a bunch of the IPs don't resolve to external addresses so you're going to have to fake the calls to check them. Here's my slack token in the channel name.
3 minute project
It doesn't do my job for me but it gets rid of a hell of a lot of tech debt that I'll never get around to. I won't give it monolithic complicated jobs because it's not good at it. But I will absolutely tell it to make me a flask app with stubs for half a dozen features. Or give it the source for a shitty old admin web page and ask it to modernize the CSS and add session logins.
Sure, if I'm not watching it it might do something relatively stupid. But honestly it has about the same odds of catching something I did years ago that was relatively stupid and telling me to fix it.
Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?
Unless you're a scammer or a spammer, the answer is legitimately "No".
My gut feeling, based on the kind of repetitive nonsense I see them produce and bang on about, is that a lot of management types see AI efficiency because the work they do is repetitive and easily aided by AI input so they assume everything can be improved by it.
Not to say I don't see the benefits of a good manager, I just don't think they are that common.
Claude can spit out powershell scripts up to like, 400 or 500 lines without errors or with minimal, easily debugged errors. Adds things like error correction, colored text, user interaction, comments the code pretty well. Saves me hours every time I fire it up, so that I can in turn save myself dozens of hours with the scripts themselves.
But as far as I tell my boss, there is no AI use, and that's how we're keeping that for now/indefinitely
you see, for programming, AI achieved what SQL tried to do with database queries: programming by just telling the computer what you want and the computer figures out the how.
the catch is that human language is imprecise, so if you don't know how to review what the AI produced, the AI might have written a script to wipe your data in the computer and you don't even know until you run it and it is too late
So you’re sharing your data with third parties and relinquishing code copyright without telling your boss?
That's pretty great, what kind of things do you use the PowerShell scripts for?
I do. Part of my job involves writing code and I often don't even know where to start. When I get the first draft I'll know which documentation to read, and then I make it actually work. Even when the LLM fails completely, writing its prompt serves as a rubber duck.
So do you frame the problem to the LLM, get it to spit out an example piece of code and then run through that initial attempt to get an idea of how to approach the problem? Kind of like prototyping the problem?
I take it you find that more efficient than traditional code planning methods? Or do you then start building flow charts/pseudo code from that prototype and confirm the logic to build more readable or efficient code?
I think your missing something big here.
A while back when one of the popular models came out it blew all the others away in benchmark tests. That got my coworker and boss super excited, we started coming up with different ways AI can help us. Thankfully as I pointed out, our software is proprietary and super secret, and all it took was a couple Google searches to find out a lot of those companies leak data like crazy and AI will just tell other people your secrets if they ask in the right way. So we needed to run our LLMs locally, but for that we'd need some beefy specs. I did the research, wrote a neovim and sublime plugin to integrate our local LLMs in a 'copilot' kind of way. My boss ordered my coworker and I whatever the new macbooks are with 128gb of memory to fit our lovely AI models, bought me a desktop tower and a few GPUs. Then I went on a 3 month paternity leave, came back and have heard nothing about AI since aside that my coworker switched to vs code to try and use continue but got frustrated, switched back to sublime and doesn't use AI anymore.
So yeah, AI got me 2 new maxed out spec machines and 2 weeks of fuck around time writing plugins that were not nearly as complex as everyone thought, just because AI was involved.
For real though, I've tried quite a few times but 9/10 it fails me and I end up spending more time messing around with prompts than it would've taken me to do the thing. Occasionally when I have a mile long error message or something super obscure I'll pass it to ollama and it seems to do well with wittling it down for me, that's about it.
I'll say it has been marginally more useful integrated into my code editor, prompt driven for me has been useless output for too much effort, but it ambiently sitting there in code editor can be helpful.
I still can only get it to provide useful suggestions about 15-20% of the time for like two lines, maybe a nice error message, but the failure rate is less obnoxious if you didn't spend extra effort to ask for it and just ignore and keep going. Getting a feel for whether or not the LLM is likely to have something in the completion worth trying to review is a part of it based on what you've typed helps. Notably if you are some keystrokes into a very boilerplate process you might be more optimistic, or if you are about to provide a text string as a human error message, decent chance it wrote that for you well enough.
Still I'm more annoyed and not sure that it's worth being annoyed, but I could buy that shaving typing out a couple lines 15% of the time could be an objective boost that outweighs the burden of futzing with the high error rate.
As a software engineer, definitely. Things that might have taken days writing a boilerplate framework and reading through docs to find out how to configure certain things could take hours now. Now I don't have to spend hours learning how to use the data visualisation library in order to fix the one donut chart on my company's site, I can ask AI to do it in minutes and make edits where needed.
It's certainly not perfect or infallible, it spits out garbage a lot still. But since I have a deep understanding of the stuff I'm working on, I can recognize when it's spitting out garbage and recalibrate.
I find it useful for correcting my syntax (when it's correct 😂) for certain networking devices. I touch so many vendors it's not always one I can remember all the commands for.
It's kinda become a Google replacement for me.
I have found certain areas it's weak and I know when to quit when I'm ahead and it just agrees with me and spits out more incorrect info when I call it out.
Also when are we going to hit an AI feedback loop? 😅
I find the AI summary can be helpful when searching, but also not much more helpful than a summary of the first few search results which are mostly only loosely related paid for advertising ..
I feel like AI is just going to end up replacing interns or entry level people, it can do easy tasks that would take a while by hand to do. Which based on how bad the job market seems to have been for people like me just trying to enter it somewhat makes sense.
So my experience has been:
Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.
In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.
Look at the rust belt to see our futures.
Is that a Reynolds reference?
You can't resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.
Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn't exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn't use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.
But it's not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy... but it didn't.
Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It's simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.
There has been a study done in 1970 called The Limits to Growth that predicted that exponential economic growth would come to a halt necessarily, because you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system. It took many decades more than predicted, but I suspect that we're actually at this point now.
Workplaces mostly exist nowadays to grow the economy. It takes rather little work to maintain the world nowadays. That is why we're facing a declining demand in human labor.
Since the labor market is a free market, it is regulated by Supply and Demand. That means, if supply is high, prices drop; if demand is high, prices rise. On the labor market, that means that a declining demand for human labor leads to lower prices for that labor, a.k.a. wages.
That is the crisis that the US is currently facing: Declining wages, a.k.a. inflation, a.k.a. Cost of Living crisis.
That crisis cannot be tackled by technology alone. We need socialism, i.e. the basic decency to treat humans well because humans deserve to be treated well; independent of economic output.
That is what i'm advocating for: UBI (Universal Basic Income), which means that everybody gets enough resources to live.
However, that UBI has to be financed somehow. Printing new money doesn't work because it leads to hyperinflation. So, the money must be collected through taxes. It is straightforward that only the rich can pay these taxes, because they are the only one who has a lot of money to actually give.
To end this article, i'd like to point out that further economic growth is not possible inside Earth's limited space, but it is possible in outer space, because there's infinite space above. Humans just have to go there.
Nobody is arguing that technology won’t progress. Even Marx defends that as a precondition for socialism/communism.
The question is the following. Tomorrow a ground breaking technology is developed that makes literally everyone twice as productive. (Please let’s ignore the technical aspect of this. I’m simplifying for the sake of the argument, but this is happening at some paces everywhere).
Now you have 3 options:
Number 1 is what people are talking about in this thread.
Number 2 won’t happen because salaries aren’t actually tied to productivity. Productivity just sets a higher limit on salary that in any case is never reached. The salaries are actually determined by competition between workers.
Number 3. Has been happening since the seventies and will continue to happen.
The problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.
Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren't great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you'd have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we've started to see in recent years a lot of these new "high demand" jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they're gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren't going to be able to keep up.
You're correct that this has always been the case in the past.
Advances in technology free people up to do other productive things.
I imagine that trend may stop some time, but I don't think we're there yet.
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%.
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.
Computerisation, the paperless office etc all were supposed to generate better quality of life for workers. It was how it was sold. The reality is that staff numbers were reduced with work and competitive pressures increasing rates of stress and depression.
Charmingly naive thinking the oligarchs will ever be happy with the level of production they get in return for less and less of their wealth.
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
I’m still waiting for self checkout, airport self service check-in, automated answer services for credit cards, and computerized healthcare systems to make food, airplane tickets, consumer goods, and healthcare less expensive.
And I feel like I’ve been waiting a while…
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
They will just lay people off and have less people
Most of my jobs expect higher output over the same duration.
So...yeah.
We used to dream that AI would do all the boring stuff so we could pursue our artistic endeavors.
Turns out it's the opposite lol. There will be no days off for us.
The other day for laughs in jira I looked at the suggested issues the AI came up with, and they looked like jargon-laden nonsense. But I could see a future where the upper management do nothing business idiots don't care and just slop up a bunch of tasks and assign those out and call it a day's work.
Everything has become an exercise in cosplaying and pantomiming the thing that's supposed to actually happen, and AI is the thing that'll really keep that train rolling. It's a fucking weapons grade, automated potemkin village creator.
Make sure to use AI to solve the issues flagged by AI.
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??
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.
But think of the productivity if we had AI and a 7 day workweek! /s
They have AI, we have the "right to work"... for minimum wage 😞
I think the plan is that a lot of people get a 0 day work week. That's one of the problems.
I think most people should get a 0 day work week. We could have fully automated luxury gay space communism.
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 🤷🏿♀️."
Human productivity alone warranted a 4-day workweek. With AI benefits added in, we should be going down to 3.
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.
Hear hear!
Yeah, I just graced with a glorious 0-day work week. There is no chance ANY of this “productivity” will get anywhere near workers. It’s just a new, exciting way to centralize wealth and power. And if the models get as “intelligent” as the claim they will in 5 years, then with a helping of slavery to boot, ones they are “as smart or smarter” than humans, just without pesky things like rights…
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?!?
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.
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!
Pfff that's coward numbers. I'll do you one better:
We should get a 3-day work week.
fuck yeah
Got ems!
Interesting that the article never cites or states how much AI has improved productivity - but rather focuses on the 4-day work week. Kinda strange to only look at the end outcome and ignore the cause of expecting that outcome.
Let's use technology to benefit workers," Sanders said.
That's Socialist thinking in a Capitalist country. He doesn't own the means of production to change the schedules. In a Capitalist country you need the market power to negotiate for it.
So call for unionizing because the opportunity is there.
He doesn't, so it is a distraction.
I think that in some domains (for example, software development) one person working 40 hours is significantly more productive than two people working 20 hours each. Coordination adds a lot of overhead. There's also the difficulty of finding a second qualified employee.
But that's all moot anyway. Someone working 4 days is always going to earn less than someone working 5, and I'm pretty sure most Americans would choose to work more and get more money even if they could afford to work only 4.
I have a 7-hour work day and a 5-day work week. I make less than I did at my previous (8.5-hour/5-day) job, but I'm much, much happier. Highly recommend working less if you can swing it.
I do agree that coordination is a PITA. But, 7 hours is doable and it's not like I'd be actually productive for an extra hour a day. My brain goes to mush.
Some of my coworkers work longer days and take every a day off every other week. As long as they work 70 hours a biweek they're good.
I don't mean to say that no-one would choose to work less, or that doing so is a bad idea. Heck, I'm unemployed and not actively looking for work right now myself.
I think that in some domains (for example, software development) one person working 40 hours is significantly more productive than two people working 20 hours each.
I'll go one further, often in software development, one person working 40 hours is significantly more productive than two people working 40 hours each.
Someone working 4 days is always going to earn less than someone working 5
I guarantee that an executive working 4 days a week will make more than the fast food worker doing 6 days a week. I get your sentiment but I don't think that even pans out for software developers. Most software developers are salaried, and whether they work 3 or 6 days in a week they get the same (just more likely to get fired if they work 3 while everyone else works 5, but their work can trump that deficit). In fact a role that is micromanaging hours of a software developer is in my experience more likely to be stingy with pay and pay less despite trying to demand perpetual unpaid overtime.
Good luck making a bigger project like that (even a small project).
