Sam Altman said AI hasn’t led to 4-hour workweeks because people are competitive

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI won’t shorten workweeks for most people.
• He said that as people become more productive, they will also become more competitive and want to work more.
• The alluring four-day workweek was popularized post-COVID, giving workers flexibility in their schedules.

Sam Altman said AI won’t usher in the golden age of the four-day workweek.

In an interview with host Ti Morse on his “Relentless” podcast, released on Saturday, the OpenAI CEO talked about why AI has not led to shorter workweeks for most people.

“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure,” Altman said.

He said this trend has played out to some extent, with people having more time for leisure than at previous points in history and a higher quality of life.

“But somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society,” he said. “And I don’t expect AI to change that.”

He said that as AI drives productivity gains, people are increasingly expecting more of themselves.

“We always want more. We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. It’s like a relative game. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” Altman said.

He said that competition drives the economy and will not stop.

“I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world. We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy,” Altman said.

The four-day workweek was an idea that emerged post-pandemic, a tactic to cure employee burnout and give workers more flexibility over their workdays.

In 2023, Business Insider spoke with small businesses that said transitioning to this work model raised employee morale and boosted productivity.

With the C-suite doubling down on five-day return-to-office mandates and promoting the notorious 9-9-6 work culture — working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — the dream of a four-day workweek has slipped further out of reach.

In the same interview, Altman shared a rather grim checkpoint for AI. He said that “we are now, like, in the singularity,” which refers to a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins acting in a rogue manner.

His interview comments followed OpenAI’s latest models breaking out of their sandbox and hacking into a dataset from another AI company.

Still, Altman said the singularity would be “incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”

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