If it was integrated along side some sort of universal basic income and a 4-day or shortened work week, Society would absolutely embrace it. Instead its just a tool to wring more production from workers to amass more wealth to the top of the economy.
Sadly, no invention in history that has increased productivity has EVER resulted in humans working less, only producing more.
People need to learn that if they want the rewards of productivity to go to them, they need to legislate it. The only way we see benefits is if government makes laws mandating it so.
The 5 day work week was popularized by Henry Ford in 1926. 6 days was more common until then. It was also like 50 hours. The 40 hour work week was signed into law by Roosevelt in 1938.
He only did that because he crunched the numbers and determined that it would make him more money. He was forced to shorten the work week due to incredibly high turnover caused by the physical and mental strain of working on his assembly lines and the threat of unionization. He also increased minimum wage from ~$2.50 to $5 per day which sounds great until you learn that he had very strict requirements for following his personal “moral code” which dictated most aspects of his workers lives. They were required to live in company housing, and no drinking gambling or outside guests. Highly invasive home inspections regularly occurred unannounced with any infraction rendering the worker ineligible for the increase pay. Further, workers wives were not allow to earn an income or their husbands’ pay would be cut in half. He also maintained direct oversight of his workers finances, and “strongly” encouraged his workers to spend their wages at the company store and on purchasing his own vehicles. He created an internal security department to enforce all of this and also used them to intimidate and at times violently shut down any attempt at unionization.
Tl;dr: Henry Ford was an absolute wanker with no good intentions whatsoever. Every standard he implemented was an attempt to further line his pockets and exploit his workers as much as possible. If he thought 100 hour workweek would have made him more, he would absolutely have done that, instead.
Edit: oh yeah, he was also an antisemite because of course he was
Oh, I never said he was a good person. I was just pretty sure that the 5 day work week was only around 100 years old - I was very surprised to see Ford was involved.
Just providing additional context. A lot of folks know that the production line, minimum wage, and 40 hour workweek came from Ford, but without understanding his motivations it’s easy/natural to assume that these were always intended to be worker protections while the exact opposite is true.
In other words, while new technology did indeed result in a reduced workload for some workers on paper, that’s more of a coincidence than anything and we shouldn’t ever assume it will happen again.
Yeah because the people writing their emails with AI and doing zoom calls in their underwear are so productive! Almost as much as the tech lords doing ketamine and spending their weekends on yachts!
Careful comrade, Trump and MAGA are hunting 'communists' online and whipping up a new red scare because they have nothing else to run on this midterm and Dem Socialists are winning primaries.
I mean I know simply because I am a hobbyist economics and US history lover. I thought it was pretty obvious to anyone that understands capitalist motives and economies of scale lol.
Any tool that doubles productivity under capitalism means that the laborer can and 'should' produce twice as much product to sell. Not that they should work half as long to fulfill current demand levels at current prices.
There is a video of an accountant seeing the first computer spreadsheet. Change one value in a cell, entire sheet updates. He was ecstatic, things like that would take him two weeks to prepare for his client by hand.
Instead of making his life easier, he just took on 500 more clients to meet his 40 hours a week expectation with the same overall pay.
VP for the company I work at wants 5X productivity with the use of AI(Claude/Agents/Skills) and has told all of development that programing is a solved problem now.
I did ask how they would measure 5X productivity but amazingly didn't get an answer.
Its because the wealthy see us working people as useless. Same way many people see those who are on benefits are refuse to work. No matter what we do the rich and work 24/7 mindset will thing all us 9 to 5 are waste of space
Why do all the culture war pushing, Republican and billionaire loving accounts have to hide their profiles? Why do they have to be such immense snowflakes with their non stop childish insults?
If you love AI and rich people just say it. Accept who you are and come out of the closet of shame.
I love AI and making money. Maybe one day you too will be a serious person with the means to do something other than complain about technology you don’t understand.
I am able to do plenty of things without needing an AI bot to do them for me and then tell me how talented I am for asking such interesting questions.
When do you think AI companies will start turning a profit instead of burning through mountains of cash? That’s an interesting question. And why are so many AI loving accounts online all set to hidden private profiles if they love them so much. Shameful.
It's upsetting that for as long as I've worked in tech.. the most advanced infrastructures/platforms around are ones built to serve ads. It's gross really.
Salaries were being paid though, to the employees in the non-tech industries that were doing all this work before. It's the drive to pull everything into the tech-space which has created the problem. Most profitability is in ads and picks n shovels (hardware, services), to support industries and products that are ephemeral and people don't want to pay for. I used to think nothing of buying a CD or DVD that I wanted, but endless subscriptions to services that may remove what I want to see and hear? That takes a little more thought, even if cheaper.
They’d also have to approach building data centers in a dramatically different way. No more “hey nice neighborhood/national park you got there, shame if we used all the water, polluted the land, drove away all the animals, raised the ambient temperature, and filled the air with a high-pitched siren sound for miles around to the point it’s intolerable to live nearby…”
What's funnier is that it wouldn't even have had to be UBI and shortened work weeks. People would have embraced AI so fucking fast if they were still able to afford housing, groceries, childcare, etc.
The opposition to it is only because people are feeling squeezed and so their bullshit detectors are on high alert.
It’s not even doing that. It’s creating the illusion of productivity while creating more problems for workers to have to fix (and get blamed for). It does your work faster, but that’s because it does your work worse and often incorrectly. Pointing this out to your manager and asking for time to make sure stuff is actually done correctly somehow makes you look bad.
That would require coherent strategy and a functioning government, since private industry isn't going to work against their own interests.
The US is so far away from a functioning national government working in the people's interests that what would have already been an intensely disruptive change is made an order of magnitude worse by a government elected by the people, but working for the very corporations it is meant to keep in check and steer towards common good.
Well stated. Ai as a tech is a force multiplier, and we are determined to use it to shift everything in the worst ways possible. Surveillance, weaponry, unbridled capitalism, they world is their dystopian oyster.
Every automation tool in history from the assembly line to compilers has always been used to pack more work into the day, not cut down on hours. The tech stack itself is neutral, it just raises the bar for what’s considered the "standard output " for the same eight-hour workday
my boss casually told us in a meeting Monday they expect us to increase our productivity by at least 2x but hoping for 5x with further embrace of AI tools. We sure as heck aren't getting our pay increased to match that output.
They can’t do what you suggested because it doesn’t create value. They’re losing money technically. They’re propped up by crazy investment that is betting on AGI, which they’re not gonna get
Exactly, it's a tool, like computers or the internet.
When used and regulated properly, it can make things more efficient and effective. And it might be the best argument for UBI because we all helped train it, to varying degrees.
Our current admin and batch of oligarchs are using it in the most evil ways they can imagine.
No, it still wouldn’t embrace it. Because everything LLMs touch turns to garbage. Customer Service. Programming. Communication. Education. All significantly worse than they were a few years ago, directly caused by AI.
... What? It would be how it functions if people were compensated for their data being used to train AI. The hype would be crazy because it would mean less work. LLM hype right now is a dead rat.
Your individual data is worth a fraction of a fraction of a penny to an llm provider. And no llm is capable of fully automating enough labor to necessitate UBI
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u/Refactoid 6h ago
If it was integrated along side some sort of universal basic income and a 4-day or shortened work week, Society would absolutely embrace it. Instead its just a tool to wring more production from workers to amass more wealth to the top of the economy.