AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies

AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies (bbc.com) 1 "An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025," remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI "formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself." However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there. Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go... [T]he former OpenAI employee said they would put in at least 70 hours a week, much more than they did in previous tech jobs... Other companies have also pushed the idea that AI will effectively reduce the number of hours people need to work, for better or worse. [At OpenAI and Anthropic] sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said... At Meta, workers said they have been abruptly pushed onto teams this year doing AI work being treated as urgent... The hours on such teams at Meta are often long, with staff working into the night, on weekends, and feeling they are "on call" during the hours they are not working, according to descriptions of the work from the current and former employees... Some new research suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads even more burdensome. A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day"... The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools. In the article Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, pointed out a problem with estimates that AI will ease the workload on humans. "People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges." The BBC also points out helpfully that "there are no limits in the U.S. on how many hours a person over the age of 16 can work." (While in the UK and Europe, "laws limit a working week to 48 hours, including overtime.") Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hadleyburg for sharing the article. Other companies have also pushed the idea that AI will effectively reduce the number of hours people need to work, for better or worse. [At OpenAI and Anthropic] sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said... At Meta, workers said they have been abruptly pushed onto teams this year doing AI work being treated as urgent... The hours on such teams at Meta are often long, with staff working into the night, on weekends, and feeling they are "on call" during the hours they are not working, according to descriptions of the work from the current and former employees... Some new research suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads even more burdensome. A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day"... The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools. In the article Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, pointed out a problem with estimates that AI will ease the workload on humans. "People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges." The BBC also points out helpfully that "there are no limits in the U.S. on how many hours a person over the age of 16 can work." (While in the UK and Europe, "laws limit a working week to 48 hours, including overtime.") Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hadleyburg for sharing the article. Who could have seen that coming? (Score:2) Anyone who actually believes AI will cause people to work less hours is a complete fuckin moron. The literal developers of AI should know better.