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”.
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 hate how people are so used to getting ripped off that they hear “four day work week” and assume that it’s going to be 4-10’s.
Like this is Bernie. He’s not perfect, but he gets this type of shit right. Obviously he’s advocating a 32 hour, 4-day work week. It says so in the article that apparently no one read. But people are just so inured to everything getting worse all the time. Damn.
I also think companies should start paying for commute times, and that the time paid should be adjusted based on the cost of living in the area and the salary.
Of someone chooses to live 3 hours away when they could live in walking distance, that’s one thing. But I work for a municipality in a prohibitively expensive area. 0 city employees live in the city they work and literally 100% of households are multi-millionaires or better. I have a 90-120 minute commute depending on traffic because that’s where I can afford to live on my salary, but it also means I’m essentially working 3-4 hours extra a day.
Of course the city isn’t gonna pay me 50% again more money, but if they were required to pay for my commute time they’d suddenly agree that I only really need to be in the office about once a week for public meetings since mostly what I do is Teams meetings, plan review, phone calls and emails, which could be done just as easily from my home office as at City Hall.
Shit - I get more done remote because I don’t have to deal with people walking in without an appointment and demanding a meeting.
best companies can do is: fuck you get back in the office. butts in seats. 29/8 grindset. ₖᵢₗₗ ₘₑ
“Should”
The USA left “should” in about 1950. There is no “should” here.
Workers were abandoned by the Democrats long ago. Union membership is now less than 10% (and most of that is government employees, ironically)… it was almost 50% back in the “good old days”.
There is no labor party in the USA, there is no anti-war party, there is no anti-billionaire party. There should be. But there’s not.
Back in the 50s they thought automation would mean we’d all have too much free time.
Too bad anyone left of Nixon was a communist.
To be fair, when I was in primary school, we were assured that the “digital revolution” (or whatever hype phrase was popular) would halve working hours, etc. What it didn’t consider is that bosses would simply demand more productivity.
I mean at all. It didn’t cross their minds that we’d be expected to be twice as productive now that everything was twice as quick. (And so on). 🤯
As history has shown, repeatedly, the only time a worker wins is when they unionise, protest and fight for improvements. You get nothing for free in the mediaeval, feudal system of the workplace.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
I never claimed it made money, I didn’t even suggest anything positive resulting from these changes.
If employers are going to be dumb enough to use it, workers should be protected.
Average Lemmy AI doomer
4-day workweek and UBI, please.
A UBI would effectively enable a 4 day work week regardless.
“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
How about a four day work week and no AI? I’m so done with this timeline.
How about a 4 day work week for 5 day pay ?
Let AI take over in exchange for 4 work days? Nope. Still not worth it even it we would get it.
And jesus christ, Bernie. Please don’t let this AI psyslop marketing campaign be the note you end on. :-(
I mean what’s next? Bernie Coin?
We should have a 4 day work week anyway, maximum.
4 10 hour days, right?
/s
If less work needs to be done by humans, does that mean we can have Universal Basic Income, and get paid extra for the jobs that still need humans?
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 you ordered from Amazon or Aliexpress on your company laptop is a 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!
AI CEOs: How about a 0 day workweek (because we want to fire all you plebs)
Absolutely. The AI will only work 4 days a week after everyone is laid off.
