Zoom CEO Latest Executive To Forecast Shortened Workweeks From AI Adoption (fortune.com) 52
AI will enable three to four-day workweeks, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The New York Times, joining Microsoft's Bill Gates, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon in predicting shorter schedules. Yuan also acknowledged AI will eliminate some positions, particularly entry-level engineering roles where AI can write code, but argued new opportunities will emerge managing AI agents. Gates previously suggested two to three-day weeks within 10 years during a February appearance on The Tonight Show.
Having a laugh? (Score:4, Informative)
We've been hearing that forever. Let me know when it actually becomes mainstream.
Add to that AI has yet to prove itself. This just sounds like a line they're giving for investors.
Re:Having a laugh? (Score:5, Insightful)
We can have shorter work weeks right now. Technological advances have enabled that long ago. The reason we don't have shortened workweeks has absolutely nothing to do with how productive tech has made workers, and everything to do with employers wanting long workweeks.
To most employers, the phrase "short workweek" means "I pay the same but get less out of my people, meanwhile my competitors pay the same but get more from their people." It is simply not rational for them to go for that.
If we want shorter workweeks in America, the means to obtain it is not new tech, but new legislation.
Re: Having a laugh? (Score:2)
A doofus in an office has a spreadsheet that says you deliver more value when youre in the office longer
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If we want shorter workweeks in America, the means to obtain it is not new tech, but new legislation.
Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out. Why would I get involved in your negotiating a four-day week and four-day wage with your boss? Why would you expect you and I to have the same preferences?
That said, there are reasons employers might want one full-time person over two half-timers. First there's communication overhead. Pretty much every job involves communication and that's overhead. Second, every employee creates overhead (payroll, reporting, scheduling, mandated benefits, and the like
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Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out.
In practice, "let workers and employers sort it out" means, "let employers dictate whatever terms they want." That's especially true in this case. If new technology lets them get more work out of fewer employees, then employers have all the leverage and workers have none. Cutting workers is what the employers want to do anyway. Workers are left desperate for work. They either accept whatever terms the employers dictate, or they starve.
You could have made the same argument against almost any worker prot
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In practice, "let workers and employers sort it out" means, "let employers dictate whatever terms they want."
That is not literally true, not in labor markets and not in virtually every other market. If employers could offer anything they wanted, they'd pay me $1/year. They do not, they offer much more than the minimum wage for something like 97% of hourly jobs. Salaried jobs have no minimum wage and yet we don't get poverty wages. Clearly the same supply/demand curves which control other markets are at play here.
That's especially true in this case. If new technology lets them get more work out of fewer employees, then employers have all the leverage and workers have none.
That's been the story of industrialization since the 1750s. Every productivity enhancement has been dec
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That is not literally true, not in labor markets and not in virtually every other market. If employers could offer anything they wanted, they'd pay me $1/year. They do not, they offer much more than the minimum wage for something like 97% of hourly jobs. Salaried jobs have no minimum wage and yet we don't get poverty wages. Clearly the same supply/demand curves which control other markets are at play here.
They offer you more than minimum wage because of the existence of a minimum wage. Otherwise they'd offer you not $1 per year, but just enough to afford to return to work when added to whatever welfare they can squeeze out of government and society. Minimum wages do apply to salaried jobs as well. Check out what you can earn in countries that don't have them, and then thank a union. Or throw off the shackles of the minimum wage and get into a type of work that really doesn't have one, gig work, and let us kn
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That is not literally true, ...
They offer you more than minimum wage because of the existence of a minimum wage. Otherwise they'd offer you not $1 per year, but just enough to afford to return to work when added to whatever welfare they can squeeze out of government and society.
You might want to read up on how economists talk about supply/demand graphs. They have to offer me enough to make taking the job be better than my next best alternative (which might be sitting on my duff flaming on the Interwebs). If I have no skills and few opportunities, yes, that's going to be starvation wages. But the vast majority of people do have options so any employer has to out-bid the next best choice.
To put it another way, I've never ever had an employer ask me how much I need to live on. The on
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You might want to read up on how economists talk about supply/demand graphs. They have to offer me enough to make taking the job be better than my next best alternative (which might be sitting on my duff flaming on the Interwebs). If I have no skills and few opportunities, yes, that's going to be starvation wages. But the vast majority of people do have options so any employer has to out-bid the next best choice.
Without a minimum wage the floor drops out of your next-best-choices and large chunks of the population end up on starvation wages. This isn't a theoretical issue you need to estimate with graphs, it can be seen in practice in jurisdictions with extremely low or nonexistent minimum wages, or even in first-world gig work.
I do not believe that is the case. Standards of living consistently rose in England throughout the industrial revolution. I just read a book by Don Boudreaux and Phil Gramm which has an entire chapter documenting this.
That makes sense, you don't believe that's the case because you just voluntarily and uncritically filled your head with a warm load of grifty bullshit "documented" by a couple of right-wing
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Mostly I'll just endorse what GameboyRMH said, because their response was right on. You've never lived in a country without strong worker protections, and you imagine the conditions in your country would be the same without them. They wouldn't.
I do need to specifically reply to one thing you said:
Standards of living and wages have been more or less monotonically increasing for two centuries
That is false. At least in the US, wages have been stagnant for decades. From a report [pewresearch.org] by the Pew Research Center:
In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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If we want shorter workweeks in America, the means to obtain it is not new tech, but new legislation.
Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out.
That could make sense, if you completely ignore facts and history.
If we reduce the per-employee overhead, that would make employers (on the margin) more willing to have shorter hour employees
That's a good argument for single-payer health care.
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Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out.
That could make sense, if you completely ignore facts and history.
The history I look to is 250 years of productivity improvements leading to economic growth and rising standards of living. I also look at the history of not having hordes of unemployed weavers, farmers, longshoremen, and office clerks roaming the streets when their jobs were automated away.
Which historical trends are you looking at?
If we reduce the per-employee overhead, that would make employers (on the margin) more willing to have shorter hour employees
That's a good argument for single-payer health care.
Well, it's a good argument of separating employment from health insurance. It's a good argument for separating employment from retirement planning (that is to say, company provid
Re: Having a laugh? (Score:2)
"Which historical trends are you looking at?"
People only getting more days off through social unrest and violence.
freedom to starve (Score:2)
ha ha, only serious [epi.org]
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Obvious questions (Score:3)
1. Will employees still be paid for full time, or (US esp.) will they be shifted to part-time, and so all their benefits dropped?
2. Exactly where will they get new employees, if HR requires new hires to have x years of experience? (No, they won't get it from other companies, who'll do the same damn thing.)
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1. Obviously not.
2. They'll add a 5-year AI bonus so people can claim 5 additional years of experience, if they know how to use AI. Of course!
Who's going to pay for it? (Score:1, Troll)
Plus anyone who is still working 996 is going to be super pissed off at anyone working three days a week.
Americans do engage in class warfare only it's just the lower classes to do it and they only fight each other.
I don't see us getting over the deep cultural conditioning that tells you the moment you see somebody happier than you that you're supposed to get angry at that person for being happy instead of upset at the system keepin
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Shit, why pay them at all 'if I don't have to'?
That's the end point utopia they are working towards.
Seems they all have in common some weird 'if I was the last man on earth' syndrome.
We're only about 20% there, but they're accelerating with all the effort and focus they can muster.
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One Man sitting on a pile of 8 billion plus skulls, secure in the knowledge that he has WON.
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One Man sitting on a pile of 8 billion plus skulls, secure in the knowledge that he has WON.
The Doctrine of Competition, sold as the ultimate means to every end and preached as if it were religion by many, is driving that "need to win." Combined with the greed that so many in power positions seem completely obsessed with, and the end-goal is always the same. Kill or be killed isn't a civilized way to view society, but we're far beyond the need to pretend to be civilized.
A mind for the bicycle (Score:2)
Steve Jobs famously stated that the computer is like 'a bicycle for the mind'.
But now, we're the bicycle, for their mind.
Funny, that.
Yeah sure (Score:1)
They'll just fire 3rd of the workforce and force everyone left to push 60h weeks instead. The CEO will be working 3 day weeks.
Profits will soar!
Senior Level Engineers Don't Grow On Trees... (Score:5, Insightful)
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How do we grow mid and senior level engineers if we eliminate the entry-level level engineer positions? When the senior level engineers retire, who's replacing them if there are no engineers behind them? AI? (can't wait to see how that goes)
I think the AI true believers really have the C-suites convinced that this will be the exact scenario. Don't hire new people now, just keep around senior staff to supervise the AI and train it up. As they age out, the AI "should" be trained to take their work as well.
Or at least it seems that's the way they are behaving. Granted, it's not like focusing on the short term and completely ignoring the long term is a new phenomenon. That's been going on for decades now.
It's going to be very interesting to see if
You force people to get those expertise (Score:1)
It's like that old meme poster about the pyramids. Never underestimate what you can accomplish with an endless supply of cheap disposable labor.
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I agree, but going fully dystopia they could require applicants to have passed a number of relevant online courses (probably created and graded by AI..) in order to be considered. Because you need to be AI-savvy to work in their company. Perhaps you can retake such tests any number of times, but they would pick the top 5-10% scorers weighted toward youth. This would be more important than a GPA, maybe no college needed even since you can offer cheaper wages to less informed people. On the job training? More
Technological progress (Score:2, Informative)
Did the loom make it so a clothier only works 1 day a week instead of 6?
Did the tractor make it so a farmer only needs to work a fraction of the time?
Automation gives a person leverage to multiply their labor. So one excavator operator can do the work of 40 shovel ditch diggers.
At the company I work at, we automate tasks all the time and we've never worked less for it, it just means we do other things.
I don't think anything different will happen with AI. Some jobs might be eliminated, workers will be able t
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Did the loom make it so a clothier only works 1 day a week instead of 6?
Did the tractor make it so a farmer only needs to work a fraction of the time?
Automation gives a person leverage to multiply their labor. So one excavator operator can do the work of 40 shovel ditch diggers.
At the company I work at, we automate tasks all the time and we've never worked less for it, it just means we do other things.
I don't think anything different will happen with AI. Some jobs might be eliminated, workers will be able to do more with less, and they'll either still be asked to work 40 hours a week because that's what they're being paid for, or they'll only be paid for what's needed (24 hours a week, say) which may not be enough to make ends meet. Oh, they thought they were going to get paid not to work those extra two days when AI is doing the job? How quaint.
And most of us have to do something to make ends meet because we're slaves to banks and debt.
What sets AI apart from historical precedence is the immortalization of "dead labor". When it can do everything living labor can do and for free the whole technology creating opportunity thing goes out the window. While this is far from what AI currently is a system that lives up to the hype sure as hell would be.
news flash (Score:2)
Equilibrium of production and consumption. (Score:2)
https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
Keynesian theory is right. The real cause of economic depressions is the mismatch between production time and consumption time which occurs gradually as productivity rises. Governments then create make-work jobs in a haphazard attempt to maintain consumption (equilibrium). Eventually, the impedance mismatch leads to collapse and a new system. We are probably on the verge of that change.
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in one sense, Trump's tariffs are an attempt to create equilibrium by pushing the disparity back onto to other countries, who would need to increase wages to maintain consumption. ultimately, two things will probably happen - real wages go up and real estate prices go down.
UBI? (Score:1)
The problem is that the capitalists will take all the profits from "efficiencies" in AI just as they have taken all of the benefits in worker productivity for the past thirty years.
Our resident Nazi tech oligarch, Musk, has told us not to worry since when AI takes over we will all have universal "high" income.
It's not clear how this will work since the ruling class has been using all of its political power to cut any benefits for the peons and transfer all wealth to themselves.
Musk himself was instrumental
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The problem is that the capitalists will take all the profits from "efficiencies" in AI just as they have taken all of the benefits in worker productivity for the past thirty years. Our resident Nazi tech oligarch, Musk, has told us not to worry since when AI takes over we will all have universal "high" income. It's not clear how this will work since the ruling class has been using all of its political power to cut any benefits for the peons and transfer all wealth to themselves. Musk himself was instrumental in the Dodgy program to cut billions in government spending that would have gone to help regular folks so that they could give tax cuts to the rich.
At a guess, Musk's vision for "universal high income" is based on the assumption that the lower classes can simply be gotten rid of, leaving only the ultra-rich and the automation to take care of them. There seems to be zero plans to allow anyone not already fairly well off to partake of any part of the economy as AI and automation take larger and larger chunks of the available work. At some point, even consumerism will collapse as there won't be any income left for the traditional middle class and down. Hi
Re:UBI? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, in Star Trek, you never see more than a few hundred people at a time. That's the future, right? RIGHT?!!
it may go down with some high profile jury nullifi (Score:2)
it may go down with some high profile jury nullification cases before the right to jury trail is taken away.
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Even worse, those capitalists won't even be public companies, they'll be the wealthy billionaires and trillionaires via private equity funds.
There has been a precipitous decline in the number of large public companies over the last decade. Expect this to get worse. Expect your IRA or 401K to crash as it becomes harder and harder to find good blue chip companies to put in index funds.
Expect your right to vote to be taken away. It has to. Otherwise reforms will be put in place to stop it as the public, now de
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Even worse, those capitalists won't even be public companies, they'll be the wealthy billionaires and trillionaires via private equity funds. There has been a precipitous decline in the number of large public companies over the last decade. Expect this to get worse. Expect your IRA or 401K to crash as it becomes harder and harder to find good blue chip companies to put in index funds.
Expect your right to vote to be taken away. It has to. Otherwise reforms will be put in place to stop it as the public, now desperate to put food on the table vote try to vote reformers in, The elite can't have that.
Expect social security and medicare to collapse. Expect suicide drugs to be passed out to penniless retirees.
I would expect the right to vote will remain, it'll just be even more apparent that every available candidate is already bought and paid for, and no amount of voting will change the course of the country. I mean, it's been that way for decades already, but at this point they're taking down the smoke machines and the mirrors. "Fuck you, gimme your money," is now a valid campaign strategy.
Re:UBI? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was waiting for this one.
Whenever I see this proposed as a solution or the coming AI apocalypse, I know it's coming from somebody who has bought the AI hype.
I use AI every day, so I'm not an AI "denier." What I do deny, knowing the limitations of AI, is that it's going to put us all out of work. This is despite the predictions of a CEO who runs a remote work company (but doesn't let his own workers work remotely).
Promised for decades (Score:3)
Tech almost never delivers its promises. Social media was supposed to unite society, but it made society more polarized and divided than ever. The internet was supposed to make information more accessible and provide benefits to move society forward, but instead its generated paywalls and fueled the outrage economy in the name of clicks. Shorter work weeks and more leisure time have been promised for decades, and never delivered. People routinely work 50+ hours per week. In the 1990s, the buzz was paperless office but now there is more paper than ever before. Consumers want cheap products and managers want complaint drones as employees who live at the office. AI is going to be used (for better or worse, most likely worse) to throw more employees out of work do the ones who remain can be motivated to work 70+ hours per week. I see no reason the believe otherwise.
just like many people can wfh (Score:2)
Most people don't want shorter work weeks (Score:2)
I expect that if if you give most people the option of a 4 day week for X$ or a 5 day week for X*1.25 dollars they will take the latter. In reality it will probably be > X*1.25 because all jobs have some "fixed costs" for things like training that mean that the work done in 5 days is > 1.25 the work done in 4 days.
Some will take the option, some will decide to work even less, but my guess is that the majority are willing to work more hours for more $
3 - 4 Day Weeks (Score:2)
And everyone just has to work 2 - 4 jobs.
The tech-brahs never mention the pay being increased to make up for less time worked.
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And everyone just has to work 2 - 4 jobs.
Think of the knock-on effect of businesses no longer needing to help cover benefits for people now working 2-4 part-time jobs instead of one full time job with decent pay. It'll be an amazing boost to the economy, and it will target the benefits at the only people that matter: C-Suite and up. It'll make the profit line go up, until nobody can afford to buy anything.
Put your money where your mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of predicting 3 or 4 day work weeks, why hasn't he implemented 3 or 4 day work weeks at Zoom? Since he hasn't, he is just spouting complete, utter bullshit.
Why would anyone believe a prediction that is being made by the exact person that is preventing it from being a reality?
lack of unions is why working time has not gone do (Score:1)
lack of unions is why working time has not gone down + OT with no pay.
We really need to move full time to 34-30 hours and add an X2 OT level at 50, 2.5 At 60, X4 at 80.
"The dental insurance... of DEATH!!!" (Score:2)