Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week : workreform

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Let's use technology to benefit workers," Sanders said.

That's Socialist thinking in a Capitalist country. He doesn't own the means of production to change the schedules. In a Capitalist country you need the market power to negotiate for it.

So call for unionizing because the opportunity is there.

~~He doesn't, so it is a distraction.~~

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Who said he doesn't call for Unionization?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Where does he do?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Constantly, everywhere?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

it is time for the party to embrace what he has long been arguing for and make backing unions a core part of their pitch to voters. They must decide, Sanders said, whether to “become a party which stands for the working class of this country” or to “remain a corporately controlled party beholden to [their] wealthy campaign contributors and to the corporate media as well

Seems that you are right.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

Most of my jobs expect higher output over the same duration.

So...yeah.

[+] [email protected] -4 points 3 days ago

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[+] [email protected] -12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Bernie says a lot.
But can't say the word GENOCIDE

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

He does, I saw an interview with him yesterday

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago

Charmingly naive thinking the oligarchs will ever be happy with the level of production they get in return for less and less of their wealth.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 3 days ago (5 children)

We should've gotten a 4-day work week decades ago. Now it should be a 3-day work week at most and I'm being generous. The capitalists are always screeching about the low birth rate, but if people were working 3 days a week and making a decent living off that time, it would help the birth rate because then a household with two working parents could be scheduled on different days and alternate staying home with the child, plus have a shared day off every week.

Anyway, that's just a selling point to make to the capitalists. Whether or not it helps with the birth rate doesn't matter as much as the fact that we're owed shorter work weeks thanks to all the blood, sweat, and tears that labor has put into making the world as wealthy as it is now. What's the point of all this work if not to improve our standard of living? Technology making our lives better is hitting diminishing returns and now it's often not making our lives better or it's even making our lives worse.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago (8 children)

The argument for a 4 day work week is that studies have shown it maintains the same level of productivity as a 5 day workweek, but it makes people happier, so it doesn't slow down the economy, but actually improves it. What's the argument for a 3 day work week?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Because people deserve more time to be people. Not everything has to serve the Holy Economy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Sure, I agree with that. However, we also need to consider what a "net decrease in productivity" actually means for the population as a whole, and whether it's something we want to accept as a trade-off for more free time. Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity. However, a decrease in productivity means that stuff like clothes, transport, food, IT services, and pretty much everything you can think of that someone has to produce becomes more scarce.

You basically need to answer the question of "would you prefer two days off per week with current access to goods and services, or have more days off with reduced access to goods and services". Of course, there may come along technological innovations that change this in some ways, and there are studies showing that a lot of people can be sufficiently productive on a four-day work week. On a society level, I still think the point stands as an overall tradeoff we need to consider when talking about whether we should reduce the work-week.

My point is that it's not just a "capitalists are bad, and we're owed more free time" thing. If we produce less, then goods and services become scarcer for everyone. I would say the distribution of wealth in society, and how it's shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning than the fact that we're working the same hours as we were 20-50 years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

My reading of their argument is that when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased. If we believe that recent increases make it so that we only need to work 4 days to maintain our current output, we should be owed 3 days because by the same logic long ago we should've dropped to 4.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased.

Exactly, so following this argument, we can choose between living at our current (increased) productivity level (40 hour weeks), or trading off the technological advancements for more spare time at the cost of going back to the productivity level we had previously.

I won't argue for which of these two is "correct", I think the tradeoff between free time vs. more access to goods and services is considered very differently by different people. However, I do think that a major problem we're facing today is that the increased productivity we've had the past 50 years due to technological advances has benefited the wealthy far too much, at the expense of everyone else.

I think it's more fruitful to first try to take care of the wealth distribution, such that we can actually see the quality of life our current productivity level can give everyone. Then we can make an informed choice regarding whether we want to reduce the productivity in exchange for more free time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I would assume that there's a balance to this. At some point the reduction of hours will result in a loss in productivity. You can do 5 days of work in 4 days if you're better rested and more focused, but this might be less true in 3 days. I mean if studies show that there's isn't a dip productivity and that it improves well being, then sure, that would be great but I think it's likely than a 4 day work week.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Imagine being rich as fuck because you're working 6 days a week instead of still barely making ends meet.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.

In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 days ago (12 children)

You can't resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.

Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn't exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn't use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.

But it's not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy... but it didn't.

Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It's simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Look at the rust belt to see our futures.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago (13 children)

Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?

I'm a telecoms engineer and I see limited use cases in my role for AI. If I need to process data then I need something that can do math reliably. For document generation I can only reliably get it to build out a structure and even then I've more than likely got an existing document the I can use as a structure template.

Network design, system specification and project engineering are all so specific to the use case and have so few examples provided in public data sets that anything AI outputs is usually nonsense.

Am I missing some use cases here?

Also, if you do see productivity improvements from AI, why would you tell your employer? They want a 5 day working week but they know what they expect to be achieved in that week, so that's what they get.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I find it useful for correcting my syntax (when it's correct 😂) for certain networking devices. I touch so many vendors it's not always one I can remember all the commands for.

It's kinda become a Google replacement for me.

I have found certain areas it's weak and I know when to quit when I'm ahead and it just agrees with me and spits out more incorrect info when I call it out.

Also when are we going to hit an AI feedback loop? 😅

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I find the AI summary can be helpful when searching, but also not much more helpful than a summary of the first few search results which are mostly only loosely related paid for advertising ..

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yes.

Document that code I wrote 7 years ago, suggest any security or efficiency changes. It's surprisingly adept at that.

Give me the changes to NixOS 25.05 configuration.nix to add wadroid. Fails with an error, paste the error back into prompt. Oh, you need these kernel modules that are no longer default as of 25.05 make this change. Different error paste it back, Make this one last change and then reboot. It works. I spent a total of 5 minutes on it. If I were just using Google and screwing around that might have been half a morning.

OBS is giving me a pixel resolution warning. AI: it's one of your cameras or some media you've added in an unsupported format. Give me a quick shell script to run through all of my media directories in this tree and convert all the MP4 video that's yuv720 to a supported format in new tree so I can swap them out in the end with no risk. 30 seconds later it's there. Yes, I can write that but I'm not going to have it done in 30 seconds. And if one of the files errors I just shove the error right back in the AI. I don't personally care why one in 50 images failed I just want them to be converted and I'm far enough along and Dunning Kruger scale that I honestly don't really care about what I don't know as long as I can learn a little more and still get the job done.

Give me a python script to go through a file full of URLs and verify the SSL key expiration dates. Have a variable for how far the future to alert and then slack me a message at 10:00 a.m. everyday which URLs and IPs are expiring earlier than that variable. Also a bunch of the IPs don't resolve to external addresses so you're going to have to fake the calls to check them. Here's my slack token in the channel name.

3 minute project

It doesn't do my job for me but it gets rid of a hell of a lot of tech debt that I'll never get around to. I won't give it monolithic complicated jobs because it's not good at it. But I will absolutely tell it to make me a flask app with stubs for half a dozen features. Or give it the source for a shitty old admin web page and ask it to modernize the CSS and add session logins.

Sure, if I'm not watching it it might do something relatively stupid. But honestly it has about the same odds of catching something I did years ago that was relatively stupid and telling me to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I do. Part of my job involves writing code and I often don't even know where to start. When I get the first draft I'll know which documentation to read, and then I make it actually work. Even when the LLM fails completely, writing its prompt serves as a rubber duck.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

So do you frame the problem to the LLM, get it to spit out an example piece of code and then run through that initial attempt to get an idea of how to approach the problem? Kind of like prototyping the problem?

I take it you find that more efficient than traditional code planning methods? Or do you then start building flow charts/pseudo code from that prototype and confirm the logic to build more readable or efficient code?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Claude can spit out powershell scripts up to like, 400 or 500 lines without errors or with minimal, easily debugged errors. Adds things like error correction, colored text, user interaction, comments the code pretty well. Saves me hours every time I fire it up, so that I can in turn save myself dozens of hours with the scripts themselves.

But as far as I tell my boss, there is no AI use, and that's how we're keeping that for now/indefinitely

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

So you’re sharing your data with third parties and relinquishing code copyright without telling your boss?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

you see, for programming, AI achieved what SQL tried to do with database queries: programming by just telling the computer what you want and the computer figures out the how.

the catch is that human language is imprecise, so if you don't know how to review what the AI produced, the AI might have written a script to wipe your data in the computer and you don't even know until you run it and it is too late

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

The other day it spit out a five line piece of code, except, critically, it had used "archived" where it should have used "received". Small word difference, huge functionality difference.

It absolutely does help, but we're gonna have a couple whole new classes of copy/paste errors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Makes me wonder what an LLM trained in lojban would accomplish.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

That's pretty great, what kind of things do you use the PowerShell scripts for?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?

Unless you're a scammer or a spammer, the answer is legitimately "No".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My gut feeling, based on the kind of repetitive nonsense I see them produce and bang on about, is that a lot of management types see AI efficiency because the work they do is repetitive and easily aided by AI input so they assume everything can be improved by it.

Not to say I don't see the benefits of a good manager, I just don't think they are that common.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Jevons Paradox

[+] [email protected] -42 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Why you care about the opinion of a guy who took the money and ran twice?

Meme material really.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

We gave him the money. Willingly. Because we wanted a better future.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 days ago

Nah, the top 0.1% will just pocket 90% of the fruits of that extra productivity and the top 10% the remaining 10%.

The rest will either be fired or asked to do the part of the work those who were fired did for the same pay.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Got ems!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

We used to dream that AI would do all the boring stuff so we could pursue our artistic endeavors.

Turns out it's the opposite lol. There will be no days off for us.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The other day for laughs in jira I looked at the suggested issues the AI came up with, and they looked like jargon-laden nonsense. But I could see a future where the upper management do nothing business idiots don't care and just slop up a bunch of tasks and assign those out and call it a day's work.

Everything has become an exercise in cosplaying and pantomiming the thing that's supposed to actually happen, and AI is the thing that'll really keep that train rolling. It's a fucking weapons grade, automated potemkin village creator.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Make sure to use AI to solve the issues flagged by AI.

Work Reform