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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Why work ten hours a day if the computer is doing the work?

Now you know how everyone felt when horses were replaced by cars. Technology has not shortened anyone's work day. Only radical labor has.

I wonder how many people spend less time working but don't spend less time at work, though. I'm sure it depends on the role/company, but there must be some cohort it's enabled to slack harder for now. Probably not engineers.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs covers this at length. There is a lot of employment that just needs a butt in the seat when or even just in case they are needed. It’s really a bit tragic how many man/woman-hours are wasted due to lack of creativity.

I call bullshit on that book. I've never worked anywhere that kept people on just for the sake of it. Sure there might have been people who probably should have been fired, but the job they performed wasn't fake.

So his thoroughly-researched book, that he spent years working on, and based on thousands of individuals submitting their experiences, is completely bogus because.... you haven't had the experience that millions of others absolutely have?

Sure pal. All jobs are totally important and not at all pointless, wasteful make-work.

Japan leads the world in this phenomenon, but no doubt much of IT/STEM is similar.

lot of performative but in practice half of the job is looking busy.

I find it incredibly interesting that the topic of a 4 day work week came up seemingly quite seriously during Covid, yet I haven't seen any mention of it since ChatGPT was announced.

No one with cash is going to fund your three day weekend. No billionaire is pushing AI so we can all get a Universal Basic Income.

EZ, we just make it the law.

No one with cash funded the 8 hour workday either. Working people bled for it, in the good old days when the oligarchs were aware what they risked by not making the occasional concession.

Goes to show how badly the social contract has broken down.

arguably they're pushing AGI so that they never have to give weekends to anyone

to paraphrase Cat Power: we could all be free... maybe not.

"Now you know how everyone felt when horses were replaced by cars"

A horse can't do 70mph for 600 miles between feeds. A horse can travel across obstacles that a car would find impossible.

It's horses for courses and a mangled analogy.

If you weren't trying to miss the analogy, you'd realize every significant technology of the last few centuries gave working people hope for less work for them. And it never happened. So expecting it with AI is fool's gold.

I meant in the sense that a person can’t do their best at knowledge work that many hours a day. It simply doesn’t make sense, for boss or worker.

If a computer is doing the grunt work, the person should be used to make the best decisions possible. That can't be done while exhausted because you're working ten hours a day.

Queue up longer term work at the end of the medium-length day and go home/log off.

Sorry, what? That's not at all what happened.

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