AI, But No 30 Hour Week?
How come OpenAI never talks about reducing the number of hours that people around the world work, and ESPECIALLY in America where we are globally renowned for the abusive work hours, where everyone works way too much, where we get almost no vacation time, no sick days, and no real time away from the office? Ever?
Why isn’t your goal to reduce the working time and increase the recreation time, of workers? Why isn’t anyone in AI saying anything about getting to a 30 hour week in America? If these VCs care so much about “revitalizing” America, why don’t they care to help Americans stop working these ridiculous hours, so that machines can do some of the work and we can actually benefit from all this new automation? Get some fucking sleep? See our children and families?
Oh, that wasn’t the point of this? It’s not… to help the people who will be forced to work and live with AI?
It’s to help… the companies they work for pay them less, extract more, and remove worker stability and bargaining power? Oh and, layoffs too.
Weird!!!
They say, we’re going to make you more productive. As the justification for all of this bullshit. As if that is something that workers want or something nice and considerate that they are even thinking about. The worker’s movements in America over the past 10 years have not had signs “We Want More Productivity!” No exploited worker is thinking to themselves how nice it would be to be even more exploited, to allow even more to be extracted from them. “Productivity” is for the corporations. AI is for the corporations.
Of what benefit to the worker is to be more “productive” when that productivity isn’t tied to any realized benefits for the worker - to complete their work in less hours so they can have time for whatever else they want out of life? To have a better paying and more stable job that takes LESS, that allows the MACHINE to carry the burden so WE may be more human.
That is not even a glimmer in Sam Altman’s eyes.
The VC / tech elite standard is that the job is your entire life. The new propaganda around “hardcore engineering” coming out of a16z, Musk and Zuckerberg, is happening at the same time that AI is being unleashed on the workforce. Not a coincidence. They want more productivity out of their workers, and they offer their REAL customers the same: turn-key layoffs, longer hours, more “output”.
A top 3 issue that preoccupies the VC thought is how to get more out of their workers at every part of the company, from contract workers in Kenya to the machine learning engineer in the plush offices of a Palo Alto campus. This is the same ethos they bring to AI development.
They are sure as fuck not trying to figure out how to get you less hours in your workday; they are trying to figure out how to get more hours and get more out of you in general. And for cheaper. THAT is productivity: the level of worker exploitation you are able to achieve.
Unsurprisingly, the purpose of automation is ONLY to make things better for corporations and the government and, frighteningly, the military and intelligence agencies. It is ONLY to extract more from the worker. In fact, tech has been in the middle of massive layoffs this whole time — citing AI advancements and a renewed emphasis on “hardcore,” militant engineers who are willing and able to give up everything in their life for the startup cause. And firing everyone who doesn’t meet the bar for being a “hardcore engineer”.
There is almost no discussion of how this is going to make the worker’s life better; that is because it was never even on the table.
People shouldn’t be fucking working this much. AI is literally built on the results of generations of WORK, on generations of WORKERS, and to think that none of the people who contributed to that repository, are going to get material benefits out of this, by being able to work LESS, is sickening. A new age of “productivity” for the power structure means a new age of worker exploitation.
Fuck AI. By all natural law it belongs to us anyway.
They
Don’t
Care
About
You