The headline on the front page of a recent Washington Post was breathtaking: “These companies say AI is the key to their four-day workweek.» The subtitle was euphoric: “Some companies are giving back more time to workers artificial intelligence supports more tasks.
Like the Job explains: “more companies could move towards a shortened work week, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance.
Hooray! There is utopia at the end of the AI rainbow! A better work-life balance!
You may have come across similar articles in Fortune Magazine and the New York Times. The AI spin brigade is complete.
Business leaders are raving about how AI will allow their employees to take more time off. Zoom’s Eric Yuan told the Times that “AI can improve all of our lives, why do we have to work five days a week? Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think ultimately it frees up everyone’s time.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said technological advances could reduce the work week to just three and a half days. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates openly wonders if a two days the workweek could be the future.
Elon Musk push the idea to the extreme (as it does with everything else): “In less than 20 years – but perhaps even as little as 10 or 15 years – advances in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where work becomes optional. » Better yet: “There will be no more poverty in the future and therefore no need to save money. » said Musk. “There will be a high universal income. »
This is all utter rubbish. Even if AI generates significant productivity gains – which remains an open question (a MIT study Last year, “despite $30-40 billion in corporate investment in GenAI, 95% of organizations are seeing no return”) – it is far from certain that workers will benefit, if at all.
If productivity increases, as it is supposed to when the workplace is immersed in AI, each worker will generate more value, by definition. And supposedly with more value, we all feel better.
Worker productivity has been increasing for years, but the median wage has barely increased, when adjusted for inflation.
Here’s the truth: The four-day work week will most likely come with four days of pay. The three-day work week, with three days. And so on.
So, as AI takes over their current jobs, most workers will likely become poorer or will have to take additional jobs to maintain their current wages.
In his 1930 essay Economic opportunities for our grandchildren, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, “the discovery of ways of economizing the use of labor” would outstrip our ability to “find new uses for labor.” In other words, less work.
Keynes was sure that by 2030 the “standard of living” in Europe and the United States would be so improved by technology that no one would care about making money. Productivity gains would create an era of abundance.
In fact, by 2030, he predicts, our biggest problem will be how to use all our free time:
“For the first time since his creation, man will be confronted with his real and permanent problem: how to use his freedom in the face of pressing economic concerns, how to occupy the leisure time that science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely, pleasantly and well.”
We’re still five years away from Keynes’ magical year, but at the rate we’re going, his prediction seems dead wrong.
Rather than creating an era of abundance in which most people no longer have to worry about money, new technologies have contributed to a two-tiered society comprising a handful of people with extraordinary wealth and large numbers of people who struggle to achieve it.
AI risks further widening inequalities.
Imagine a small box – call it iEverything – capable of producing for you everything you could possibly want. It’s a modern-day Aladdin lamp. You just tell him what you want and – presto! –the item or service appears suddenly.
This sounds wonderful until you realize that no one will be able to buy the iEverything because no one will have any way to make money, since the iEverything will do everything.
This is obviously fanciful, but the dilemma is very real. The productivity gains are considerable, but the question that is rarely addressed is how they will be distributed.
The distribution problem cannot be ignored. When you can do more with fewer people, who gets paid what? It depends on who has the power.
If workers don’t have the power to demand a share of productivity gains, the profits will flow to a shrinking circle of owners – leaving us with less money to buy what can be produced.
If the five-day work week with five days’ pay shrinks to four days with four days’ pay, then three, then two, and maybe one, AI will supplant most people’s jobs and drive down our take-home pay. We can see a dazzling array of AI-generated products and services, but few of us will be able to buy them.
But this is not necessarily our destiny. If AI generates significant productivity gains, how can average workers get a share of those gains? They can get a share if they have the necessary bargaining power.
It seems doubtful that unions can provide this power. Forty years ago, more than a third of the private sector workforce was unionized. Today it’s only 6% – that’s not a lot of power there.
Which leaves politics. Will average workers gain the political power to demand a share of AI’s productivity gains?
It depends on whether one of our two dominant political parties will demand and enact laws that distribute these gains more equitably (think wealth taxes funding child care, elder care, and health care, for example).
If not, perhaps a third party will emerge – a workers’ party – dedicated to this?
In the meantime, don’t be fooled by the breathless nonsense that AI would allow employers to “free up” their employees’ time.
The real question is whether the productivity gains from AI, if it is effective, are shared with workers. And the truth is that employers won’t share these gains unless forced to do so.
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Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor emeritus of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a columnist for the Guardian US and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is available now