Humans in the Loop

AI is here, it’s getting better, and it’s not going away. In fact, it will be better by the time you finish this article. The headlines keep shouting about job losses and robot uprisings, but the real story could be much duller and far more important. What if we just keep working the same hours, despite all this newfound efficiency?

That’d be a hell of a missed opportunity.

Bernie Sanders doesn’t think we should miss it. The legendary US Senator come out swinging, saying AI should be the key to a 32-hour workweek. Not less pay. Less collective grind. It’s hard to argue with Bernie. If machines are doing more of the heavy lifting, who gets to benefit? And remember, he’s speaking from Trump’s America.

As a result of the extraordinary technological revolution that has taken place in recent years and decades, American workers are more than 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, almost all of the economic gains from these technological achievements have been going straight to the top.
Bernie Sanders

This isn’t some Utopian fantasy. There’s substance here, some real life, already happening chat and examples. Henley Business School found that more than half of professionals in the UK reckon a four-day week is realistic, thanks to AI. And Autonomy, a think tank that’s been banging this drum for a while, estimates nearly a third of workers in the UK and US could shift to shorter weeks by 2033, just by leaning into the productivity boost AI offers and sharing the spoils with workers.

The UK has ran its own four-day week pilot and made it look perfectly doable. 61 companies, close to 3,000 workers, and not a productivity disaster in sight. In fact, most of the results were better than expected. AI played its part, cutting through the admin, the duplication, and the meetings that should’ve stayed emails. AI should impact not just in how we work, but how long we work for.

Even in the corporate world, some are seeing the light. Roger Kirkness at Convictional has locked in a permanent 32-hour week for his team, powered by AI. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hamlyn of Trepwise is nudging the conversation forward in the UK, noting that if the work can be done faster, maybe we don’t need to pad the calendar in the puerile pursuit of presenteeism. This is name of my next punk album.

This isn’t a new, grand concept. The Industrial Revolution gave us machines that could spin, press, and dig faster than any human. We didn’t just keep adding output forever. Oh, with the added benefit they were safer. Eventually, people pushed to work less. Six 12-hour days became five 8-hour ones over time.

Billionaire Steve Cohen and others have argued that routine Friday productivity drops, combined with AI advances, make a four‑day work‑week “inevitable”
Investopedia

The challenge today is that change is happening at breakneck speed. The period of adaptation will be quicker than we can keep up with, so we need to get on this conversation now.

The leap to a four-day week isn’t a tech issue. It’s a will one. It’s a political one. An economic one. A leadership one. And yes, it’ll take some uncomfortable conversations in boardrooms and Cabinet meetings. Oh, and shareholders might need some convincing too.

If AI is our generation’s steam engine, maybe it’s time we stop obsessing over what it would take and start asking what we actually want from it. If the machines are taking on more, surely we should all get something too.

A Friday off would be a good start, right?