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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if productivity is ever going to increase to the point where we work one day a week.

No, we're not going to reach that point outside of sci-fi utopias. I don't believe even the 4-day workweek is going to become a thing. Any increase in productivity will be captured by the owners, it makes no sense to give it back to the workers in the form of free time.

Comrade, what about the A.I. already doing some of our work? I recently read only the title of an article here that pointed out that drawing leaves less of a carbon footprint when it is done by the A.I. It is not a long way from there to getting paid for not going to work. This is how A.I. kills you (3x), not with a laser gun, but with a lullaby.

My carbon footprint while writing code is 100% lower than that of the AI, I would reckon by magnitudes

There's an unfortunate mistake there

> Any increase in productivity will be captured by s/the owners/society/

The population will grow to the limits set by our productivity.

Productivity has skyrocketed, we crossed ~ 20% of current GDP per capita around middle of the last century and we would be able to get by quite well with that. There would need to be many policy and cultural changes to do it but it's definitely collecitively a choice today more than anything else.

It's not "collectively a choice", the gains are accumulating at the top, and the fat cats have no reason to tell people they can work less now.

How we distribute the surplus of production is decided democratically even with the current main knobs (taxes, income transfers, regulation, etc). And of we're not limited to existing tunables. Exercising this choice would need to start by citizens becoming active with this of course.

Probably not. Not for skilled jobs anyway, unless you mean that "productivity increase" will negate the need for serious skills. School isn't where you learn your craft, it's at work. I can't make myself learn a new programming language outside of work. I've tried, but I glaze over very quickly. There must be a need for me to do something, and "I'd like to learn Rust" isn't a need. "My team needs this tool and are relying on me to build it" is a need. If I'm trying to do that and learn Rust at the same time, one day a week is useless. At that rate I'd be lucky to get it done in a quarter, and from one week to the next I'd have forgotten most of what I "learned" the preview week.

For me, 4 days is perfect. I get a three day weekend every weekend, but I don't actually dread Thursdays because I feel like a failure in work.

Not without a drop in living standard, no. If you're good with what was normal in the 1950s, we easily could. This will obviously keep going, in about 2060 you will probably be able to afford a 2020s standard of living on one day of work.

Waiting six days to finish something because you didn’t get it done last time… that’s not gonna work.

> Waiting six days to finish something because you didn’t get it done last time… that’s not gonna work

You'd hand off work, to humans and machines, with a bit of overlap to sync expectations. With enough automation, it becomes plausible. But not in the near future.

What overlap? You asked for a one day work week. You’re either idling your equipment and space or you have employees who mostly don’t meet each other.

> You asked for a one day work week. You’re either idling your equipment

Why?

An automated factory that has a team come in once a week to monitor and maintain isn't beyond our current capabilities for several simple products. It's simply uneconomic. It's not unfeasible to imagine that changing in the future.

You’re having a very, very basic failure of logic.

The set of all coworkers who work the same day as me is disjoint to the set of all employees who work on days when I do not work. Because anyone who works on Monday by definition of a one day work week does not work on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. if I see them at work today they will not be at work tomorrow.

The best I can do is if there are split shifts on the same day, where someone shows up to work a few hours before I leave. But if for instance the problem is that a requirement for my work won’t show up until tomorrow, now I have to communicate with them.

There are three options I see. The most likely is that my communication is one-shot through a computer system, where I can try to tell someone who works tomorrow what needs to be done, in which case the task will have a bimodal completion time of either 2 days or 8 days with very little in between. Second option is I can tell the late shift person who will have to play telephone with two or three more split shifts to make it around to tomorrow morning.

And the last option is that I’m communicating to my fellow coworkers on my days off. Which means I’m working multiple days a week. Which only counts as one day a week to managers who are touched in the head.

In summary, there are many, many things one can do with a >1.5 day work week that simply stop once you reach 1.0.

> You’re having a very, very basic failure of logic

Good sign you’re missing something.

> anyone who works on Monday by definition of a one day work week does not work on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.

Why are they coming in so much? Everyone comes in on Monday, does some work, tasks the machines and then fucks off.

> most likely is that my communication is one-shot through a computer system

You’ve never heard of a West/East team handing off that never meet? It used to be quite common in trading.

Hell, I’d venture Tarsnap could run today with less than a day of work on Colin’s part each week.

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