There will come a point where no job is needed. - Elon Musk
Five years out, we’ll work three or four days a week. - Eric Yuan
Automation is bound to lead to more leisure time. - Sam Altman
These predictions are mostly about a world that’s far away. But it cannot come soon enough.
We have been sold a pleasant picture of AI. That it would take care of the drudge work, we would work three or four days a week, and the rest of our time would go to family, creative projects, community, or simply doing nothing without feeling guilty.
But better models alone were never going to get us there. We needed an unspoken social contract that when AI let us do the same work faster, we would still choose to do the same amount of work.
We have done exactly the opposite.
Every hour saved becomes an invitation to add another task. Instead of creating leisure, AI has raised the ceiling for what is expected of us. We are not only working with more tools. We are being asked to produce more because those tools exist.
The problem is that AI does not decide what happens to the time it saves. People do. Companies do. Most workers do not have enough bargaining power to say, “This tool has saved me two hours, so I am taking those two hours back.”
And work is complicated. We do it because bills need paying, obviously. But work can also give us rhythm, friends, mastery, identity, and purpose. That is how someone can spend forty years doing something and still care deeply about it.
What feels different now is the rush. Even when we find meaning in our work, we are rarely allowed to stay with it long enough to become immersed in it. There is always another thing the model can help us finish faster.
This is partly pressure, but it is also excitement. These tools are fascinating, and it is easy to mistake having more capacity with needing to use every bit of it.
The question is not whether AI can save time. Clearly, it can. The question is, who gets to keep that saved time?