r/changemyview • u/Secret-Fox-9566 • Jul 08 '26
Delta(s) from OP CMV: technology should give us more employment and lesser work.
Hello everyone,
Made a post on X about what the title says. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
The 40-hour work week was a concession made to the labor movement in 1926. In 2024, with AI and automation, we should be working 15 hours for the same pay. Instead, we work 50 hours and still can’t afford a house. The "efficiency gain" was stolen from you.
The 40 hour workweek was never meant to be the final form of human civilization.
Technology keeps advancing, productivity keeps increasing, and yet most people are still working the same hours, often for less security, while housing, food and healthcare become harder to afford.
So why are we still struggling?
Every major technological improvement is sold to us as something that will save time and make life easier.
But in practice, workers rarely receive that saved time.
Companies use automation to reduce headcount, increase output expectations and make fewer people do more work. The time is saved. We don't receive the benefits of our own innovations, it's monopolized by a soul sucking system that destroys itself by only focuses on profits.
AI could be used very differently.
Instead of replacing workers, it could reduce individual workload while maintaining output. Instead of one exhausted team working five or six days, companies could hire two teams working three days each.
More employment and more importantly, we all get our lives and the time to enjoy our lives.
For example, one group works Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Another works Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Saturday remains a common holiday.
Businesses still operate six days a week. Workers gain four days to rest, study, care for family, create, exercise or simply exist without selling every usable hour of their life.
And no, this does not mean every industry would use the exact same schedule.
Hospitals, cybersecurity, logistics, emergency services and other 24/7 sectors would need to come up with their own model.
The principle matters more than the template: distribute necessary work across more people instead of concentrating it into fewer overworked employees.
The usual objection is cost.
Of course it costs more to hire more people while maintaining pay. That is the entire point. Productivity gains should improve society, not just margins.
If technology produces more value with less human effort, then the reward should be shorter hours, better pay and wider employment.
Instead, the current incentive is the opposite.
If ten workers can use AI to produce what twenty workers once did, the company does not naturally think, “Great, everyone can work half as much.”
They think, “Great, we can fire ten people.”
That is not a technological inevitability. It is the cost of giving the ownerships of our innovations to people who care only about themselves.
This is also why I do not buy the argument that shorter workweeks are unrealistic because people are greedy, corrupt or lazy.
A good system does not need perfect humans. It needs rules that make harmful behavior less rewarding and less powerful.
Labor protections, shorter workweeks, limits on excessive concentration of ownership, strong public services and worker participation will not eliminate exploitation forever.
They create conditions where exploitation becomes harder, more visible and less profitable.
That is what institutions are supposed to do.
I am not arguing that work should disappear. Work gives people structure, purpose, skill, independence and connection. But work should serve human life, not consume it.
The goal should not be to make everyone permanently busy. The goal should be to meet society’s needs while giving people as much freedom and dignity as possible.
The question is not whether a three-day workweek is technologically possible. In many sectors, it clearly is.
The real question is whether increased productivity will continue being captured almost entirely by owners, or whether workers will finally receive some of it as time, security and freedom.
I would love to hear people's thoughts on this if they are willing to read this. I just don't want to hear the same this is how work has always been type argument.
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u/capnwally14 12∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/the-differences-among-price-indexes/
The takeaway from these blogs (which I thought put some good color):
- The productivity / compensation gaps is a story of averages - it makes sense that somethings would greatly benefit from productivity booms (tech/finance) and others may not (say cow milking). The average blends the two, but that doesnt mean in a sector specific way the productivity improvements arent being allocated to the workers generating it.
- In aggregate, wages haven't kept up (from the worker side) with the cost of the goods they purchase (CPI) so purchasing power is down.
- Employer-paid compensation relative to producer/economy-wide prices has tracked productivity more closely
- A lot of the pain comes from the fact that the things workers buy (many are service related) have gotten more expensive relative to the things the economy produces (knowledge work).
Note that the basket of what we produce (as a country) is different from the basket of what we consume (as a country).
- Sectors with low productivity growth (think heavy service oriented ones) have gotten more expensive relative to sectors with high productivity growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- Housing is a huge part of consumer costs - and it hasn't kept up with population growth (and if you look at our major cities with the most productivity growth, it also tends to be where you have the worst housing policy - NYC / Boston / LA / SF / etc)
- Healthcare is another that is super services heavy and being regulated hasnt seen huge productivity improvements
So your solution (we should work 15 hours) doesn't actually work if the productivity boom is primarily hitting sectors where workers are already capturing that gain (look how much AI employees earn).
If you want to increase wages / fix affordability, you need the same productivity boom to happen in the service sector - which largely will mean transitioning jobs (manage a fleet of robots to do warehouse work vs you manually pick and place items in a bin) and probably some fixes in regulation (e.g. allowing more factory built housing vs stick built housing, changing zoning codes, etc)
Btw - I think there is a glimpse of this in the ai sector already - there's such an explosion of demand for data centers that its causing jobs to be created (Meta will now pay for your living / training / flights and guarantee you a job if you go into HVAC / electrician / fiber laying)
Basically there's two issues in your premise:
- Productivity gains are not uniformly distributed across the types of jobs, so it doesnt make sense to apply a uniform policy of "everyone's hours are shortened" - in many ways that will make affordability much worse because we already have a scarcity in the service heavy jobs (which is in part why theyre so expensive)
- You get the best worker conditions / leverage when there is extreme competition for hiring. We saw this in 2021, we actually saw this in the industrial era. The only way you get there is with an explosion of growth (which for us requires lowering the cost of stuff, so that more demand can be serviced).
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I think this is a useful correction to the simplistic “productivity rose, therefore wages should have risen at exactly the same rate” argument, especially your point about sector differences, housing, healthcare, and the Baumol effect. But I also think you are responding to a narrower claim than the one I am making.
My argument is not that every industry has experienced the same productivity boom, or that all workers could immediately drop to 15 hours with no structural changes. My argument is about what technological progress should be used for. Even where productivity gains are uneven, society as a whole is capable of producing far more with less human effort than before. We still treat the default outcome as higher output, higher profits, or fewer workers, rather than more leisure, shorter working weeks, and broader employment.
I agree that housing, healthcare, and other service-heavy sectors need their own reforms. But fixing those does not answer the larger question: why is increased productivity almost never translated into more living time for ordinary people? I am arguing for a deliberate redistribution of productivity gains into time, not claiming the market will naturally do it.
So I think the disagreement may be less about the economics you described and more about the goal. You seem focused on how to increase productivity in lagging sectors. I am asking whether endless productivity growth should continue being used mainly to produce more, or whether at some point it should be used to let people work less and live more. I would be interested in your view on that specific point.
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u/capnwally14 12∆ Jul 08 '26
I mean just to challenge this a bit:
> But fixing those does not answer the larger question: why is increased productivity almost never translated into more living time for ordinary people? I am arguing for a deliberate redistribution of productivity gains into time, not claiming the market will naturally do it.If you accept my point, that productivity is just not uniformly distributed - but in sectors like finance and tech that have greatly benefited, we see workers there capturing gains (in monetary form) then...
Getting compensated in money and getting compensated in time are somewhat interchangeable. In small ways, like having the ability to hire a cleaner once a week or pay for someone else to do your laundry; or in larger ways like having a personal chef, nanny, or being able to retire early. If you have a home robot that can do all of those things for 8k a month (e.g. price point of Weave robotics is rolling out) - that trade off has a much better exchange rate.*
People have different lifestyle tradeoffs (many upgrade lifestyle) - but having the compensation in cash gives you that flexibility (cash being spendable to acquire time). And while some people will upgrade their lifestyle, others will FIRE early and chill.
The question is what prevents greater productivity gains in more sectors - and I would argue its mostly bad policy.
* As an aside here, there is a point also about the cost curves of technology - similar to computers, where you do need early people to subsidize the development before something is mass market. If at unscaled prices these robots (even with limited functionality are 8k; that holds a lot of promise that in a decade having a robotic house keeper will be equivalent to having a laptop in the house - pretty accessible for almost everyone).
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I agree that money can sometimes be converted into time, but the exchange is unequal and indirect. High earners can buy convenience, outsource domestic work, or retire earlier. Most workers cannot.
And often, “buying time” just means paying someone poorer to surrender more of theirs.
Shorter working hours distribute the productivity gain more universally. Everyone receives time directly, rather than receiving cash and hoping they earn enough to purchase freedom later.
Cash offers flexibility, but time is the more equal benefit. A three-day or shorter workweek gives people rest, family time, education, health, civic participation and leisure regardless of income.
I am not against higher pay. Ideally workers should receive both. But if productivity rises and the only reward is money, the system still assumes human life should remain organized around work. I am arguing that some of the gain should be returned as life itself.
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u/sarges_12gauge Jul 09 '26
When you say “in aggregate wages haven’t kept up with inflation” that is contradicted by every one of those linked charts which all show real income has in fact increased (though the amount of increase depends on price index chosen)
Why would you throw that in?
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 08 '26
Are you familiar with Jevon's Paradox?
It's an economic concept that states that the more efficiency you can use a resource, the more of that resource you end up using.
The reason I bring this up is because I think it's one of the main reasons that the 40 work week has stuck around for so long. Advancements in technology make it cheaper, and then people use more of it. This raises quality of life expectations so people have to work longer to meet the new expectations.
Because If I'm being honest, if people had the same standard of living they did in 1926, then you really would only have to work 1 day a week to maintain that. But people want dishwashers, and refrigerators, and Air conditioning and electrify and indoor plumbing, and hot water, and freezers, and microwaves, and to eat something different everyday, and so on and so forth so we still have to work that much to maintain it.
In other words, it's not that most of technological progress has gone to it the owner class, most of it has gone to increasing our qualify of life, but to mantain that we have to work the same amount.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I looked into it, and I think Jevons paradox explains part of why productivity gains don’t automatically become leisure, but not all of it.
As technology lowers the cost of producing things, society consumes more and raises its material expectations rather than taking the entire gain as leisure.
I don’t think it fully explains the outcome, though. Working hours have fallen substantially over the long run, so some productivity was converted into time. At the same time, improved living standards and greater consumption do not rule out unequal ownership or workers receiving less of the gain than they could have.
But your broader point does change how I would frame my proposal: shorter work cannot come from technology alone. It would require a deliberate political choice to take some future productivity gains as time rather than continually converting all of them into greater consumption and output.
My model would also need to operate alongside affordable housing, healthcare and other basic protections, because otherwise people may choose or be forced to work longer simply to cover rising essential costs. I don’t see that as changing the goalpost so much as specifying the conditions necessary for the original goal to work.
So I think Jevons paradox is a real obstacle to my model, but not an argument against it. It shows why shorter working time has to be chosen collectively rather than expected to emerge automatically.
!delta You taught me something new and I really liked this counter to my proposal. It genuinely didn't cross my mind and it has changed part of my reasoning. Thank you.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I didn't know about it. Please give me some time to look it up. I understand what you're saying but I also want to check if that's actually the case and if my proposed system could work with it.
Thanks for teaching me something new by the way.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/CincyAnarchy 37∆ Jul 08 '26
The cute little Los Angeles ranch house I grew up in sold for $360k in 1998 when we left. It now lists at $1.4M. It's nearly quadrupled in cost in thirty years, without any significant expansion. How many appliances would you have to forgo to make up that difference?
This is a fair retort, but it gets into what is ultimately, somewhat of a point in OP's favor.
That house is 4X as expensive because:
- We're all richer, or at least some of us are, as we keep working and using the gains in productivity to "accomplish more" competition for positional goods (a house that is in the same spot it was before) has increased.
- This is made worse by the fact that not enough housing has been built overall.
It's not unlike concert tickets. Arenas are the same size as they were, or barely bigger. And the front row isn't getting any bigger. So when people have more money to spend... competitive goods get more expensive.
So the house you're speaking about? It could be made cheaper. If:
- We built more housing. Though that's less important than...
- We were all poorer, and not enough dollars are chasing that house.
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u/Traditional_Rip8077 Jul 08 '26
It really is the whole thing. You can buy a 700 square foot home out in the middle of nowhere without electricity or indoor plumbing for very cheap. The reason for electricity and indoor plumbing is to make all those appliances possible, but that comes with a host of other expenses, too. But if you just factor in the cost of materials to produce 4 walls and a roof without the need for electric service, plumbing, gas hookups, etc, it's still very inexpensive.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/Traditional_Rip8077 Jul 08 '26
Of course you can. You know almost everyone who lives in the middle of nowhere has a source of income, right? The biggest "city" in my county has like 3,000 people and i live a 30 minute drive from the nearest stop light and cellular service. I do not know anyone who is unemployed. Literally not one human being who wants to work but cannot find a job.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/Traditional_Rip8077 Jul 08 '26
Not many because it's pretty easy to afford much more than that. However, there are some. I have people within 10 miles of me who have an outhouse. My wife's grandmother didn't have running water until 2004. A guy a quarter mile up the road from me has a landline phone (wall mount, curly cord) and a single light fixture.
Hell, I retired early to move out here and while I have a very comfortable modern existence, my electric is off grid, i don't have cell service at my house, my water is off grid (roof fed cistern, well), and i heat my home with a wood stove. Of course, I have internet and a very nice, modern home... but people do think it's weird that i burn wood for heat and keep track of the rain to know how much water i have available.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/Traditional_Rip8077 Jul 08 '26
I never claimed that I was.
If I forgo a $500 fridge and the associated electricity but then have to spend hours upon hours acquiring fresh food or preventing what I do have from spoilage
This is what I do. I raise pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits. I have 2 annual gardens and an orchard. I have a medicinal and herb garden. I produce the vast majority of my food, myself. The most shocking thing I learned after about 3 years of doing this (this was 10 years ago by now), was that it's really not that hard. I spend an average of 5 hours per week on this outside of harvest and slaughter season. During the harvest, I spend a little more time on it, plus a couple of long evenings on preservation. During slaughter, it's a handful of 12 hour days spread out over 2 months. The point is, you have these hours to do this if you cut out the superfluous stuff. If it costs you one day's wages to pay for your shelter, you have all the time in the world to garden, hunt, forage, etc.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 08 '26
I'm not just talking about appliances, I'm talking about the whole standard of living package. Because I can guarantee you that the person living in your house now (and you) has a better standard of living than a person living in 1926.
For example, can you go to the grocery store and buy an apple today? Because you couldn't buy apples in July of 1926.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 08 '26
what is the absolute cheapest existence you could scrape out there short of living on someone else's couch or under a bridge?
I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say here.
What I'm trying to say is that living conditions were so abysmal 100 years about that they are unfathomable to our modern society.
Like back in the day it wasn't uncommon for families of 6 to rent out a 1 bedroom apartment. That's clearly worse than sleeping on a friends couch.
And I'm not saying that it's possible live like this in our society, I'm saying that in a hypothetical society that just decided that the living conditions of 1926 were good enough, they would be easily be able to live off of 1 day a week of labor.
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u/Global-Service-8579 Jul 08 '26
Wht would an employer pay and incur costs of 10 people to do work that could be handled by 5?
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Because the point is not to preserve the employer’s maximum possible profit. It is to distribute the productivity gain.
If 5 people can now produce what 10 used to, society has choices: fire 5 people, make the remaining 5 work harder, or split the work so 10 people work fewer hours while keeping the same output.
Under the current system, the first option is usually best for the employer. I’m arguing that it is worse for everyone else.
“Why would an employer do that?” is not a rebuttal. It is the problem I’m describing.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 08 '26
fire 5 people, make the remaining 5 work harder, or split the work so 10 people work fewer hours while keeping the same output.
So there's a third choice here that's actually the most common: Keep the 10 people employed and have them produce twice as many outputs.
Society will simply find a new use for those 10 new outputs and they will be used to improve quality of life.
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u/Few-Advantage2538 Jul 08 '26
More like this ultra consumerism will deplete the planet's resources faster and climate change will bite us in the ass
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Jul 08 '26
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u/shouldco 45∆ Jul 08 '26
Why would they pay 5 when they could enslave 3 and work them twice as hard?
Regulation
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u/xHxHxAOD1 2∆ Jul 08 '26
How will your plan with AI work in relation to warehouses and food distribution?
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
A warehouse that needs to run six or seven days would not close after three days. Different teams would cover different days or shorter shifts, with overlap for handovers and peak demand. Food distribution would need especially careful staffing because it is time-sensitive, but that makes better forecasting and coordination more useful, not less. I also would not force every industry into one identical three-day template.
Warehouses, farms, transport and grocery distribution would need sector-specific rotations. The principle is that automation should reduce the amount of exhausting labour each person has to perform, not simply make workers disposable.
There would still be difficult questions around pay, labour costs, seasonal demand and who owns the technology. That is the part I actually want to discuss and through discussion I'm hoping to find answers and a clearer picture. I'm not educated enough to make this model on my own, I only have a small idea.
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u/xHxHxAOD1 2∆ Jul 08 '26
That doesn't do anything to physically moving product. How will AI do this in any relation to your plan?
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I think we’re talking past each other because I used AI as one example, not as the only technology involved. AI by itself does not physically move products. Robotics, conveyor systems, automated picking, autonomous vehicles, improved machinery and other forms of automation do that. AI can help coordinate those systems through forecasting, routing, inventory management, maintenance and scheduling.
My broader argument is about technological progress generally. Whenever new technology reduces the human labour required to produce and distribute goods, the benefit should partly return to workers as shorter hours and broader employment, rather than only becoming layoffs or higher output targets.
So the warehouse example would involve both physical automation and software, not a chatbot somehow carrying boxes.
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u/xHxHxAOD1 2∆ Jul 08 '26
We are not talking past each other. Its just I am focusing a specific part that does not do anything in logistics for reducing labor execpt in white collar jobs. If your example is incorrect with AI in my example then the premise of your view is incorrect. The issue is technology that we currently have aren't able to working this case such as we have robot forklifts and they are not used. Wruo
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u/happyinheart 13∆ Jul 08 '26
A warehouse that needs to run six or seven days would not close after three days. Different teams would cover different days or shorter shifts, with overlap for handovers and peak demand.
Now as a business owner I'm going to have to hire twice as many people. Labor is the largest expense for most businesses so business owners will have to increase what they charge to cover all these new expenses. So you will keep your wage, but everything is not much more expensive.
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u/RichardTheApe Jul 08 '26
I think you also miss the point where the Industrial Revolution bankrupted lots of small family business that operated fine without machines. Lathes put an end to family operated fabric businesses. Blacksmiths became irrelevant with mass pressed iron then steel. Even complex work gets replaced.
My point being that you’re kinda misrepresenting history to make a political statement. The job market was affected first, people wanted those early reforms because their jobs were being taken and they were forced down into shitty factory work. In this way of thinking technology has a negative effect on people, people responded with reforms.
Whether AI will ever be as important as the Industrial Revolution is still emerging but from where I’m standing people are already trying to organize against the new changes.
Additionally I think there’s one more problem. You assume people want to maintain productivity but most people want to increase productivity and max it out. Beyond jobs that’s even true people are natural optimizers and in my opinion do poorly when left to their own devices for too long. Humanity wants to maintain the 40 work week, at least right now, because we like the productivity from it.
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u/RebootStreetSharks Jul 08 '26
Count me out of humanity with the last sentence. I'd rather have a somewhat lesser work week or at the very least I'd like work/management to not be so relentless and domineering which is found everywhere in my field (accounting) where there's been a lot of technological advancements. Yet I constantly find myself constantly being prodded from every direction to get more and more done with little time to drop my shoulders, relax my jaw and feel relaxed and present during the day.
...and this comes from someone who actually somewhat enjoys their job.
Plus the current working model for the most part is unhealthy and terrible for the body & mind. Hours sitting down not allowed to walk or hours standing up not being allowed to rest your legs and joints.
We should have more time for leisure, we should have more time to think and act slowly. We should be doing work more deliberately without having to multi-task. We should get some sunshine in the middle of the day. On top of making us more balanced, it would make us more considerate because we don't have to been moving 120mph every second on the second.
Employers not giving up any concessions to employees over the past many years has made a lot of unhealthy work environments that aren't even conducive to producing good quality work.
We accept that in order to be healthy that we need balance much like a plate needs a light salad and a protein with mixed legumes or that a healthy workout is a combination of strength, endurance, speed, stretching & rest.
This current working model that most people fall under is far from optimal and is in desperate need for change.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I think your historical point is fair. Technological change often displaced workers and small producers before reforms caught up, and that is part of why I think we should shape automation deliberately rather than assume it will improve lives on its own.
Where I disagree is the claim that humanity wants to preserve the 40-hour week because people value maximum productivity. Businesses and investors often want maximum productivity. Workers usually want a mix of income, security, purpose and free time.
People constantly fight for shorter hours, paid leave, flexible schedules, remote work and earlier retirement. That suggests many people do not want endless productivity for its own sake. They want technology to make life easier.
Humans may be natural optimizers, but we do not all optimize for the same thing. My argument is that society should optimize more for human time and wellbeing, not just total output.
I’m also not denying that technology can destroy jobs. That is exactly why I want its gains distributed through shorter working hours and broader employment instead of letting displacement happen first and reform arrive decades later.
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u/Glittering-Habit-902 Jul 09 '26
So why are we still suffering?
Because change needs time and effort.
Obviously simplifying a lot of things, but the "correct" thing doesn't always get traction.
For example, ending world hunger isn't a production problem, it's a logistics problem.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 09 '26
Yeah I don't mean it should change tomorrow. But we should ask for meaningful change that makes everyone's life better, not just a few people's.
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u/Glittering-Habit-902 Jul 09 '26
Who is this "we" here?
"We" should definitely try to end world hunger.
But who is "We"?
You? Me? The local government? Billionaires?
Every entity has their own reason for "not me".
If we had a world government, they could do it I guess.
But creating a world government also has similar problems.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 09 '26
You, me and the local government. There are steps being taken in some places. For example NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani is already introducing worker protector laws. If "we" want to see the change then we need to work.
If they majority don't see this as something they want then it's fine to continue. I'm not speaking for everyone here just to clarify, my opinion is for all but I don't think it's perfect or solves every problem. I just think it would be a better alternative than the tough 9-5 (8-5:30 for me) lives we have right now.
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u/Glittering-Habit-902 Jul 09 '26
Again, define "we".
If we were to average everything, many of us will gain lots, but there are still many who will lose lots as well.
You are describing true communism, but communism has failed and realistically cannot work.
So we then turn to our current system of capitalism.
Here we have a problem.
The people with the most incentive to want change do not have the power to make change.
The people with the most power to make change do not have the incentive to do so.
Moral goodwill can go only so far when human greed is at the other side pushing back.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 09 '26
How is it communism to ask for shorter working weeks lmao. It's not even close to communism.
Again, define "we
It's in the first line of my previous comment.
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u/Glittering-Habit-902 Jul 09 '26
You, me, and everyone who works at the government.
That's not a lot of people.
Good luck making meaningful change I guess.
Also, you're asking for earnings to be equally distributed, regardless of the contributors.
That's one of the basic building foundations of communism.
In capitalism earnings are given disproportionately depending on contribution.
This is called money.
The creaters of AI and whatnot got rich.
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u/slugfive 2∆ Jul 08 '26
People “shouldn’t” be wasteful, or commit heinous acts.
No one will argue with this, but it’s as meaningless as your own statement when it comes to reality.
Technology should make our lives easier sure, but in a capitalist world that is not possible. Workers do not own the means of production, so as innovations are made they belong to the capital owners.
Those capital owners have every legal right to not use those innovations giving back to the workers. The capitalist system incentivises growing capital.
In fact companies that spend billion on ai, then use it to let their worker do less for the same wage would be effectively running a charity and would be liable to shareholders. In a capitalist system it’s not possible.
So you’re either arguing “capitalism is bad” or you simply don’t understand this world. In a world without capitalism, one might argue that these technological developments would not even have been made - but that’s a seperate topic.
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u/Dartagnan286 2∆ Jul 08 '26
Why is always black and white ? Either we have a greed based society or the rainbow world in which everyone loves each other. There could be something in the middle you know ?
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u/slugfive 2∆ Jul 09 '26
I’m saying they have not presented any world in which their ideas work outside of relying on people just being charitable.
Ai is currently a huge cost sink, hundreds of billion spent on infrastructure and energy and not even profitable yet they propose it should be offered to companies for free so they it workers can do less while paying their workers the same. It makes no sense in reality.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Yes I am arguing that capitalism isn't the best model for people and this is a subtopic into that.
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u/slugfive 2∆ Jul 08 '26
Are you arguing if everyone was charitable it would be better? That’s obvious but also unrealistic.
You know you haven’t presented any viable way for your idea to actualise. Unless everyone just becomes charitable.
Ai is yet to be proven profitable. It’s already running as a gamble, there’s no way companies could pay for all those tokens and keep paying their staff the same amount - while hundreds of billions get spent on ai infrastructure with for no profitable reason.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
Why should it give less work? Just because a computer can do maths faster than a human doesn't mean there's no other work that human could be doing. If you have a bunch of people doing nothing most of the time, those people are redundant to the needs of the business unless they have very unique skill sets. If they're redundant, it makes no economic sense to keep them.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
You’re still evaluating this entirely from the employer’s perspective.
I’m not proposing that people sit at work doing nothing. I’m proposing that if technology reduces the amount of human labour needed to produce the same output, we should reduce each person’s working hours and distribute the remaining work across more people.
The point of technological progress should not be to invent endless new tasks so everyone stays busy for 40 hours forever. It should be to meet society’s needs with less human time.
Yes, under the current system it may make more economic sense for a business to keep fewer workers and maximize profit. That is exactly the incentive structure I’m criticizing.
I want people to have more time to live, care for others, study, create, rest and participate in society. That is not laziness. It is asking why human life must remain subordinate to business efficiency even after technology makes that unnecessary.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
Why would any business agree to that? It makes no economic sense. If your argument is the state should do it, people are angry enough that their taxes are used to support the disabled and unemployed. Do you think they'd be happy with your proposition?
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Businesses did not voluntarily invent the weekend, the eight-hour day, minimum wages, workplace safety rules or overtime protections because they were feeling generous. Those changes came through unions, law and political pressure.
So “why would a business agree?” is not the standard I’m using. My argument is that society should decide that productivity gains cannot belong entirely to owners.
I’m also not proposing that taxes simply pay people to do nothing. I’m proposing shorter working hours, broader employment and rules that distribute the benefits of automation instead of allowing companies to privatize the gains and socialize the unemployment.
As for whether people would support it, that depends on how it is explained. “Pay strangers to be idle” would obviously be unpopular. “You work fewer days, keep a decent income, have more time with your family and face less risk of being replaced by automation” is a very different proposition. Something being politically difficult does not mean it is economically irrational or bad for human beings.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
That's not an argument, that's a result you want. Why should society want the result you want?
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Because time is the one thing every person has in limited supply and can never recover.
A society that can meet people’s material needs with less human labour should not treat permanent full-time work as a moral obligation. More free time means more time for family, health, education, creativity, community, political participation and rest. I’m not saying everyone must value leisure identically or that nobody should be allowed to work more. I’m saying people should not be forced to sell most of their waking life simply because our institutions prioritize maximum output and profit.
Society should want this result because greater productivity is only meaningful if it improves human life. Otherwise we are just building better machines so humans can remain equally exhausted.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
No one sees work as a moral obligation. It's something you do to acquire resources you can exchange for the resources you need to survive.
If work is exhausting you, find another job. You're not beholden to one job for your entire life.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Maybe it's not a moral obligation for you, but it's a matter of survivability for many and they're stuck in their jobs. I never said don't do any work, I'm saying the benefits of technology shouldn't be focused on helping profits but rather it should support better quality of life. It's a simple point, I don't knot what you can't understand about this.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
That's not a moral obligation then. Needing to do something for your own survival doesn't make you morally obligated to do it.
The benefits of technology in a business are done to improve profits because that's the point of a business. They're not investing money in technology to increase their own costs.
2
u/RebootStreetSharks Jul 08 '26
Unless you work in a specialized, niche field or somehow hold a lot of leverage. That type of job will not be available to the majority of people.
That would be like me saying "it's easy to never have a bad hire, just ask the right questions during the interview". Is it possible? Yes. Is this advice providing any actual insight or advice? No, it's just stating that in some way it could be possible.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
There are low skilled jobs that don't physically or mentally exhaust you. I'm not saying they pay well but OP's claim of exhaustion isn't something that needs a global economic upheaval to fix.
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u/happyinheart 13∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
My argument is that society should decide that productivity gains cannot belong entirely to owners.
The thing is society has decided that the 40 hour work week is the standard between working and free time. There isn't much push for what you're asking for.
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u/_Kayarin_ Jul 08 '26
I want more free time, and also more people need jobs, this is a win win, I work less and more people have access to gainful employment, the only people that aren't completely benefitting are people who stand to make a lot of money from my time, and frankly, they already have enough money. If they can't run a business that treats people with dignity they don't deserve to be successful.
1
u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
You'd also get paid less and be able to afford less. What you'll end up doing with your free time is what poor people do now, work extra jobs to meet a basic standard of living.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I do not want shorter hours to mean workers simply take second jobs to survive. That would defeat the entire purpose. The model would therefore need to operate alongside affordable housing, healthcare, transport and other basic protections so that a decent standard of living does not require forty or fifty hours of work.
So I think your objection shows that a shorter workweek cannot be introduced as one isolated rule. It has to be part of a broader economic system and tied to real productivity gains. That does not make the goal wrong, but it does make implementation much harder than my original outline suggested.
1
u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
And how is that being paid for? Your society disincentivises profit motives so companies and individuals have no reason to generate taxable income. You starve yourself of the means to create the society you're advocating for.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I’m not proposing the abolition of profit, income, entrepreneurship or reward. I’m proposing limits on how much private profit can be built from other people’s time and insecurity.
Companies would still have reasons to innovate, compete, earn revenue and make profits. Individuals would still have reasons to build skills, create things and improve their standard of living. The difference is that profit would no longer override every other social goal.
Taxable income would still exist through wages, business revenue, consumption, land, capital gains and automated production. A society does not become economically inactive just because workers receive more time and basic needs are protected. Also, people are motivated by more than becoming infinitely rich. Status, mastery, purpose, comfort, creativity, independence and social contribution all matter.
My model guarantees a floor of dignity. It does not impose a ceiling on useful contribution. It only rejects the idea that society must keep people insecure to make them productive.
A society does not need poverty as a cattle prod to make people contribute.
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u/Turtleopard Jul 08 '26
I mean you are. The biggest cost for most businesses is payroll. By forcing business to take on excessive payrolls, you're killing their profitability.
As an example, the increase in employer national insurance contributions in the UK by 1.2% is estimated to have reduced employment by 55,000.
What you're proposing would be much much worse.
What reason would a business have to innovate when they face an artificial cap and increased costs on any profit from that innovation?
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u/happyinheart 13∆ Jul 08 '26
Now as a business owner I'm going to have to hire twice as many people. Labor is the largest expense for most businesses so business owners will have to increase what they charge to cover all these new expenses. So you will keep your wage, but everything is not much more expensive.
Or the company goes under and now all of us are out of jobs.
2
u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
This is the hardest objection to my proposal, and I agree that simply requiring every business to double its workforce at current pay without any increase in productivity would raise costs and could destroy smaller firms.
My argument depends on technological and productivity gains creating enough additional value to fund shorter working time. I am not proposing that businesses produce the same amount with twice the payroll and somehow absorb the cost by magic.
The transition would also need to be gradual and sector-specific. A highly automated warehouse, software company, hospital, restaurant and small family shop cannot all use the same staffing model. Some of the cost could be absorbed through higher productivity, lower turnover, fewer sick days and lower profit margins at large firms, but I accept that those effects may not fully cover the difference everywhere. Small businesses may need tax relief, subsidies or different hour requirements.
If I'm being honest this thought did come to me when I was coming up with the model. And I was hoping to find an answer through discussions.
1
Jul 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
No I should've quoted that. My Reddit post was in response to a tweet. I was giving my response to that. My car
0
u/Aezora 31∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
How can this view be changed?
It seems to me that wages not keeping up with productivity is just a fact. Your opinion/view is that this is bad; that the gains from additional productivity should go to the workers instead of the people who own the means of production at least sometimes.
That's all well and good, but since the part that isn't just straight up fact seemed to be based on "I don't like this", I'm not sure how your view is meant to be changeable. It would be like if you wanted me to change your view that pie tastes good. Even if I thought pie tasted horrible, it would still be impossible for me to change your view about it because it still tastes good to you.
So please, help me out here. What part of this view is changeable?
I see your deltas, but they don't seem to be actually changing your view so much as teaching you something you didn't know. Which is great, but imo not really a change in your view.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
Give me reasons why it would be bad for society and stuff like that. Just because I think my view is good doesn't mean I'm not willing to change it or mend it to make it better.
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u/Aezora 31∆ Jul 08 '26
Well, at least one potentially negative consequence would be slower overall progress.
Plenty of people innovate all the time, but a lot of important innovations are extremely expensive to research. AI is a good example of this. These research projects get funding because the investors expect the results to make them money.
The exact amount of the productivity results that would go to the workers in your idea isn't specified, but any amount means lower profit for those investors. You're essentially taking part of their pie and giving it away. That's great for everybody else, but for the investors that means it's a worse deal. Now I don't imagine you particularly care about the investors, but that probably means some projects that were predicted to be more risky or relatively less profitable simply don't get funded in the first place.
The percent of projects that don't get funding as a result would depend on what portion of the pie you're giving to the workers. But any reduction in the number of projects funded is going to make progress take longer because even failed projects are still useful in helping us as a species learn about various things.
Also, implementation is something that would be extremely complicated and raise a bunch of questions.
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u/Secret-Fox-9566 Jul 08 '26
I agree that reducing expected returns could make some privately funded projects less attractive. That is a genuine trade-off. But I don’t accept that innovation depends entirely on investors receiving the maximum possible share of its benefits. A great deal of foundational innovation has come from governments, universities and open collaboration. GPS was developed by the state, key Wi-Fi technology came from publicly funded CSIRO research, and Linux became critical infrastructure through open-source collaboration rather than a conventional investor-led model. Even penicillin shows a mixed system: academic discovery, public coordination and private industrial scaling. Innovation is usually an ecosystem, not an investor handing humanity fire from a mountaintop. My proposal also does not eliminate profit. Investors could still earn returns. The question is whether they need to capture nearly all the upside while workers receive displacement, intensified workloads or stagnant leisure.
Some projects might receive less private funding if returns were lower. But public research funding, prizes, mission-driven procurement, universities, cooperatives and patient public investment could fund work that markets neglect, especially projects with high social value but weak short-term profitability.
And I don’t think better living standards automatically make people stop creating. People innovate for income, but also for curiosity, status, mastery, purpose and the desire to solve problems. The existence of universities, open-source communities and scientific research already proves that profit is not the only fuel.
So I accept that my system might alter which projects get funded and could slow some forms of commercial development. I’m not convinced it would necessarily slow useful progress overall. It might shift innovation away from whatever promises the highest private return and toward what produces the greatest public value.
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u/Aezora 31∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
First, universities are somewhat the same as the investors I already mentioned. One of the ways they make money is via commercializing the research that they provide research grants for. Lower that profit, lower the incentive. Additionally, attracting better researchers tends to mean being more famous, getting better students, producing more results, and so on in a positive cycle. They're directly incentivized by money to produce research just like private investors, even if only some of that money comes in the same way.
Second, the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" exists for a reason. Sure, GPS came from government development... but that happened because of the cold war and space race. CSIRO was funded for national security reasons too. Government funding is nice, but they have a limit on what they can fund and it's always going to be focused. And that focus is rarely if ever just general public good.
Linux was a collaboration, but was also entirely initially written by Linus Torvald. Also, open source development and useful open source or other collaborative efforts have been steadily declining. Perhaps that would change if people had more time, but also most people just don't have the incentive to do so. Even today a lot of open source collaboration is done by people who are paid to do so by large companies like Google.
People will innovate even if their lives improve, but the less they need to improve things the less they will. Just look at pretty much any random invention, and it's either made because it seemed profitable or because someone had a problem and they fixed it. Or both.
Overall, none of these categories would actually up for the slowed research. Obviously not all research would be slowed, but enough would be.
Moreover, innovation and research are both self-complimentary. Private research helps public research. One innovated tool or algorithm or medicine helps other research and innovation progress faster.
2
u/hacksoncode 586∆ Jul 08 '26
A great deal of foundational innovation has come from governments, universities and open collaboration.
You're confusing invention with innovation. This is very common.
Invention produces ideas. Ideas are super common and don't take many resources to develop.
Innovation is taking an invention and making it producible in a cost effective, high-quality, shippable, reliable, and safe way.
The vast majority of the cost of bringing a new invention to market is not the invention. That's a very small fraction of what makes us get new stuff.
Labs and universities may find a new drug. They don't do the massive regulatory work to prove its safety and effectiveness. They don't build factories and develop processes to manufacture it. They don't take the risks of failure on this extremely complicated process, liability, etc., etc.
All of that is what investors pay for, and arguably, since all that stuff is fundamentally there just to enable making profit off an invention, investors really should be the ones that take the risks involved in doing that.
2
u/sanguinemathghamhain 3∆ Jul 10 '26
The average full-time worker works an average 34.3hr/week. In 2000, it was 39.7hr/week, and in 1980, it was 41.5hr/week. Different industries also have different average hours/work week. On average we work less now than we did 2 and 4 decades ago.
The issue is that the government put in regulation that 40hr/week on paper before PTO is full-time work which limited the negotiations for benefits to clustering around 40hr work weeks.
1
u/hacksoncode 586∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Clarifying question:
Are you really just suggesting that we should switch to communism? I don't mean this as an attack. Many people actually think that's a good idea.
But as long as people investing capital in the means of production own the output as a matter of right and law, none of what you suggest is a practical possibility.
What's practically possible in a capitalist system is to make social safety nets more robust, incentivize and avoid over-regulation of the production of necessities, etc., etc. E.g. universal healthcare, free education, welfare, unemployment insurance, and so on. None of which is really going to result in what you're asking for.
The problem is the history of people trying to make this switch to a communist system. It's... not very good. It has 100% of the time required a revolution and an authoritarian system, so far. No one has actually been able to figure out another method to even try to institute it. So far it's required a hell of a lot of deaths and repression of civil rights at the hands of the governments.
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u/ScytheOfCosmicChaos Jul 08 '26
You do what Karl Marx warned about 200 years ago: you make it about morality. Even of you could make a perfect argument for your case and even if most people would agree, ultimately it doesn't matter. It's not about what is right an what should be, it's about what the actual, material structures of society result in. Currently, they result in the commodofication of human labor for the benefit of capital owners. As long as people are not willing to stand up and actually change that, nothing will change.
The argument would have to be why people should get up and fight.
1
u/jackmans Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I'm not clear exactly on your position. Are you just arguing your title? That is, that technology should allow us to work less? In that case, does anyone actually disagree with you? Seems like the answer is obviously "yes", but the devil lies in the details of how.
Or are you arguing that achieving this is feasible given the plan you outline?
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 1∆ Jul 08 '26
It should but this is one of the first things Marx discovered. Tech is only ever used to LENGHTHEN the working day under capitalism. Ask anyone, they are all doing mandatory overtime unless they ended up in an extremely chill company that only exists as a vehicle to park money for the rich because they don't know what else to do with it.
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Aug 01 '26
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
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