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
It needs to bring a UBI with it.
Oh that note, looking back, Andrew Yang might have been the best choice for a nominy in 2020.
Imagine if chatGPT came out and then the president of US, who fully understands the enshitification and rug pull model of Silicon Valley just slapped a huge VAT tax on it, or maybe forced companies to charge the real price.
Man Biden was such a bad choice in 2020
UBI without price control is useless. Rent is just going to go up by that amount and same for utilities, food, etc.
it's kinda bringing a "0 hour work" week for a lot of people.
I don't care if they bring 0 work day if they pay me universal income. I could learn full stack, draw, read books, open a company, etc. Now all I do is word, excels, and a tiny bit of incident response.
I went to college for spreadsheets.
Obligatory shoutout to read David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs".
I'm willing to work 4x 7 hour days. If you think about the last 30 years of computer enhancing productivity, we're owed a lot!
I work like a truck, so 4x4 would be appropriate.
I work like a piece of wood, so 2x4 is all I'm asking
And they're really like 1.6x3.5
Why not 3x 7 hour days if the productivity gains are that great‽
yeah other places like the netherlands already did 4 day weeks before AI. we can go further.
My workplace has hybrid system. 3 days in office and 2 days remotely.
It has shifted so, that people work their ass off during those 3 days using AI as much as possible and during those two remote days they just sit on their asses with a laptop running in the background, mouse jigger on.
A full screen PowerPoint/Google Slides also keeps your machine awake.
Yeah. Plugging in a USB device that you bought online is a risk, unless you have enough knowhow to analyse it first on your machine running a wm.
Safer mouse jigger is a small slow electric motor and some legos.
Any solutions for trackball mice?
Motor and legos should work fine. You just need to glue something on with a little more traction on it.
There is also a powershell script you can use to press numlock on-off in set intervals, but that's more visible to IT, if your company uses activity analysis.
How paranoid are you if you test every USB device? OK got a new memory stick or keyboard. Gotta test it!
Plugging shit you ordered from Amazon or Aliexpress on your company laptop is a definate no no, unless you can be sure.
The company laptop isn't mine, that makes it the perfect test environment!
We have mandatory biannual courses with a quiz on how not to be you. 😆
They really suck ass, but I see they have an actual function.
We only get a quiz that badly teaches you the very basics of how to start a fire. A lesson I learnt when I was about 5. They call it fire safety but its mostly just what does a fire need to burn.
Fuel, oxygen and an arsonist!
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.
- 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.
"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?
I also have an office job and can tell you I have uses for it.
I don't use it to produce anything, but where I am researching something and have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more which are then verified.
have run out of leads it can sometimes produce more
I sometimes use it for that too but imo that’s a downgraded replacement from asking a colleague or a more senior person.
The capitalist class has squeezed the workers so much that taking a step back and asking your peers can be seen as wasting time, but that’s when breakthroughs happened.
If your wondering why I use it, well I think big brother is probably watching so my use shouldn’t be zero. I would much rather have collaboration time
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.
Possibly, but there's no practical use for it in my industry, and everything I've seen it try and do has been, at best, mediocre. I've also noticed that the people who are most enthusiastic about it are never particularly impressive themselves.
Overall, I think it gets far more credit than it deserves, from both it's fans and critics.
Kinda makes sense that the people you see getting the most out of it aren't particularly "impressive" when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Whether or not those workers will actually see any financial benefits out of it is a different question entirely.
But even fairly modest productivity gains multiplied across millions of workers can have enormous consequences.
Good yes finally! We need to burn the planet for modest productivity gains.
when a lot of its practical utility is in fairly mundane office and middle-management work, no?
So business created inefficient ways of working then pat themselves on the back when they come up with an expensive shortcut?
Or you know, office processes are the problem.
Oh, I think we both know the answer to that question.
I have no opinion on this conversation, i just wanna acknowledge your username and how it fit the conversation.
If employers are going to be dumb enough to use it, workers should be protected.
Yeah but 4x8 workdays are gonna be just as productive as 5x8, if you factor in general mood improvements.
Using AI as a scapegoat is fine, i guess
Average Lemmy AI doomer
That's a pretty ignorant statement. It has, objectively, changed the world. It has changed how we look at healthcare, politics, the economy, news, social media, the law, and countless other industries. Wtf do you mean it's not going to change anything? I'm not arguing for AI, but I'm frustrated at your head in the sand approach.
Bless uncle Bernie, but the US is in no state to even consider this. It has installed capitalism as its king.
AI CEOs: How about a 0 day workweek (because we want to fire all you plebs)
Understatement of the fucking century