Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits, they are normal people who wanted long careers and are as nervous as anyone about competition amd what AI will do to organizations if people become truly redundant.

"Hence too the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer's time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." - some crazy radical economist, nearly 200 years ago

> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.

In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.

This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.

You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".

Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.

is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.

When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.

I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work

Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?

[dead]

> I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off.

Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1]

I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then.

[1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...

lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder.

The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.

I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.

Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.

> Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains.

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

Connectivity/the Internet gave a bit of a boost during the 1990s, but the numbers pearked around 2004:

* https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

* https://www.csls.ca/ipm/31/gordon.pdf

>I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance

Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.

That's the path America is on at present.

Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?

What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.

Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.

Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn.

But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries.

The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man

Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?

One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.

That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.

Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.

We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.

Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.

> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place.

If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out.

Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher.

(Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)

This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.

The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.

Its not a communication overhead, it's that business owners want to maximise their returns on their fixed operating costs subject to the 5 day limit. One extra staff member in a traditional office is extra software license, extra seating, extra hardware, extra HR/payroll/insurance, extra risk, extra training etc etc.

Remember to thank your unions for the weekend.

I think this is where one of the biggest gains in productivity from AI will come from. Even if it levels off at current levels of “intelligence” a 30% reduction in team size will save alot of communication overhead.

We think of productivity as linear to the number of employees, but it’s more of Log(N) for knowledge work because of the communication overhead. If your AI spend and employee productivity improvement ends up being proportional to headcount thats a linear gain that used to be Log(N).

> What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people.

Why make that assumption? The company has a lot of per-employee fixed costs, which means that it's much more expensive to have 5 employees than 4 employees under the assumption that total productivity is exactly equal in both cases. (And the further assumption that you pay more productive workers more than you pay less productive workers.)

If you want flexibility on the work week, get rid of the concept of "full-time employee" status and make everyone contractors.

<insert required disclaimer here that fiduciary duty does not require using every opportunity to increase shareholder value>

Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.

> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.

Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.

You should talk to your union rep about that, because renegotiations like that won't happen on the individual basis just because you think its right. And almost all lack the leverage, individually, to make it happen.

Of course, until just recently, Big Tech workers were so proud to be on top of the world that they didn't think unions made sense for them.

Were you among them? Has that changed?

something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company

AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.

That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes.

Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.

That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.