4 day work week would be already possible if we didn't use a sizable amount of our industry production to just make useless crap. It would be 3 days, if we abolished planned obsolescence and made thing repairable.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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According to Bullshit Jobs it would be less than half the working hours if we just stopped doing those
I think he estimated we'd only need to work about 15 hours per week.
How about a no day workweek?
YOLO, bitches.
Stop giving AI more credit than it deserves. It's not going to change the world, it's not going to revolutionise industries, it's going to keep spitting out verbose nonsense until we get bored of it.
Im surprised there are still people down on this first step of the ladder you're lingering on.
Even most AI pessimists these days agree its useful as a force multiplier, allowing one person to do a bit more work in a given time frame, while still maintaining that its not competent enough to entirely replace a human in all but the most fringe cases.
"Its useless and acheives nothing" is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
You can remain anti-ai while still being realistic that it can be useful.
Especially if you acknowledge that the product is not the root of the problem, the late-stage capitalist system its being built to serve is the problem.
It sure is useful at making my boss post a lot of conflicting things because AI can’t understand context at all. “Force multiplier” doesn’t mean it’s multiplying good things. It can just as easily multiply nonsense.
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- The cost of operating these machine learning systems is too high, and the benefit too low:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/
https://cybernews.com/ai-news/ai-token-human-salaries-automation-spending-tech-execs/
- The most productive thing the current generation of machine learning systems has done is fill the Internet with garbage:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1971683/ai-is-filling-up-the-internet-with-garbage-spam-sites.html
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/over-50-percent-internet-ai-slop
https://mashable.com/article/ai-generated-internet-era-already-here
- LLMs are real, AI is fake.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
The current trends in software development are being driven primarily by the interests of venture capitalists who are trying to escape the debts they acquired buying into Web 3.0 (remember Web 3.0?), the Metaverse/VR, and cryptocurrency. They're looking for the next big get-rich-quick option, and manipulating the market to try and force it to happen. The people making decisions about which projects get funded literally do not care if the end product is useful or destructive or whatever, as long as it looks convincing enough to get other people to buy it. This is why there's been so much recent hype about "AI" "escaping" its test environments and hacking other companies &etc. It makes the product sound more capable than it is in reality. It's also why the Trump administration is all-in on "AI" development and actively threatening people who object - because Trump loves a good scam that he can make money off of, and he loves to respond with violence or threats of violence when people get in his way.
The current generation of machine learning models requires vast amounts of input data to achieve useful outcomes. The entire content of the public Internet has already been scraped and ingested. There is no more training data to feed in. The current systems will gain marginal improvements in efficiency and in focusing the models to perform better at certain tasks, but that will be it. They will not magically become capable of learning new tasks for which there is not millions of data points for training. The training is done, refining is in progress, but there will not be any major leaps in capability. There certainly won't be a general artificial intelligence.
Maybe the next generation of machine learning will produce software that can teach itself without an Internet's worth of input data. That will happen after the current market implodes, and another generation or two of research and development is completed.
Perhaps there is some value in the current generation as you say. Whatever the benefit of it might be, the cost is far too high. It is not and never will be worth the damage being done to the Internet, the economy, human society, and the environment we all live in.
And I haven't even gotten into generative models being used to create child exploitation material, run massive scam operations, produce massive amounts of propaganda, or enable the authoritarian surveillance state. This stuff is trash, the people in charge of the development are trash, the people peddling it are trash, the people funding it are trash, and the people that support it are trash.
Get correct.
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"Its useless and acheives nothing" is not a realistic take and anybody who does any kind of office job and has used an ai in the past year would be able to tell you the same.
I have an office job and I can tell you it’s useless.
Sure you might feel like your being more productive but that’s only because your lowering your output quality.
Reducing cost by reducing quality has always existed.
Think about it this way, if you reach support helpline, would you feel like your getting the same quality support if it’s a chatbot?
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"sorry, best we can do is 2 shit jobs 7 days a week. AI took all the good ones and we're not sharing a fucking thing with you"
- billionaire scum
I used to travel regularly to Germany, spains and France, for instance work on production sites and equipment there. The standard legal working week currently in France is 35 hours. Currently data shows on average US workers work 34 hours a week. To be honest, it’s not that far off from the 32 hours Sanders is suggesting in his legislation he is coauthoring
You're missing an important distinction, though: in the US, health benefits are tied to full-time employment, and most places consider anything under 35 to be part-time. I've had several jobs that would force me to clock off if I was at risk of hitting that full-time threshold. I had times where I was struggling to make ends meet, but they wouldn't let me work more. And, at least in my state, if you take on a second job, wages from the second job are taxed at a higher rate.
So 34 American hours and the benefits associated are very different from 35 French hours. Codifying the threshold for full-time employment at 32 hours instead will only benefit white collar workers. Everyone else will just get their hours cut even further and be driven further into poverty.
Basically, we really, really need to fix American healthcare before anything else, because until we're on a single-payer system, most changes to labor law will fuck the most at-risk populations.
Very good points. Yes indeed that is a very important distinction. I agree 100% that the US healthcare system and its current for profit system needs to be fixed!
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The issue is that you have to work 38 to 40 hours a week to get full time benefits, so most Americans aren't getting healthcare or vacation days at that level of employment, as they are considered "part time workers."
Tying healthcare to employment in the first place needs to end.
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Denmark made the 32-hour workweek standard and their GDP went up. The fact that other countries aren’t following suit is proof that the capitalists don’t even follow their own statistical models.
Uh, no we didn't. I wish we did, though.
Every once in a while, some politician brings it up, but 37 hours is still the default.
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sanders has finally lost it if ai comes for workers, those workers wont even have a week to work with
Absolutely. The AI will only work 4 days a week after everyone is laid off.
"Should," yes.
"Will," not in Christian America, sunny Jim.
I mean if it can do it all it should be technically a zero day workweek but we know that is not true. Honestly there should always be humans in the loop.
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I've been waiting for a four day week since the spinning jenny.