Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Sam Altman told the podcast “Relentless” this week that artificial intelligence will not produce a shorter workweek, and that the reason is that you poors absolutely love working yourself to the bone to make billionaires like him wealthy.
“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,” he said. “But somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society. And I don’t expect AI to change that.”
Nah, he's probably not looking smug here. Or maybe he is. (Image Press Agency/depositphotos)
“We always want more,” Altman explained, as if talking down to a room full of toddlers. “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.” Competition, he added, drives the economy. Which, if what he says is not actually true, is the sort of thing a person would say when the only available alternative explanation is “whoever owns the means of production keeps the gains” – a much harder sell to the general public without calling anyone who disagrees with it a communist.
The podcast discussion was supposed to be around the four-DAY week, which is a real proposal that can’t get here soon enough. Altman somehow conflated this with the four-HOUR week, promised by Tim Ferriss in a 2007 book about outsourcing your email to Bangalore. Refute the maximal version, decline the reasonable one, book the next appearance. It’s the Circle of Douche.
In the same interview, Altman said we are “close to creating the genie that can grant any wish,” and that humanity is currently living inside the singularity, which he rates as hugely positive. The genie grants any wish. Any wish at all. Just not Fridays off. Also, Altman owns the genie.
In 1930, W.K. Kellogg put his Battle Creek cereal plant on a six-hour day, and parts of it stayed there until 1985, despite (or perhaps because of) having an owner who originally designed cornflakes as a product to stop people from masturbating. I forgot what point I was making by telling that story, but I didn’t make up the part about the cornflakes; it’s true. Anyhow, in 2022, 61 UK companies ran a four-day-week trial and 92 percent of them kept it after the trial ended. But don’t worry, if you still want to work 80 hours six days a week to help Altman earn another few billion dollars, he says he’s happy to let you as long as you can convince him you are properly motivated enough.
He offered these observations about humanity’s bottomless appetite for work while owning a company where staff reportedly regularly work up to 80 hours per week. In the summer of 2025, OpenAI ended up shutting down entirely for 7 days because everyone was losing their shit. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, after Meta hired away at least eight OpenAI researchers in the lead-up to the one-week break, said, out loud and on the record, “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something.” By something, he meant human property, except he didn’t use the word more commonly associated with human property.
To recap: OpenAI’s one experiment with mass leisure was compulsory, ran a week, was triggered by people leaving for ostensibly better pastures, except in this case it was Meta, and as the old saying goes, out of the shitshow fire, into the shitshow frying pan.
Altman closed on what he mistakenly thought sounded like a positive note. “I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world,” he said, obliviously. “We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy.”
Keynes once predicted a 15-hour workweek by 2030, which is four years away. The wish has been submitted to the genie. The genie has come back with a counteroffer of more hours, an assurance that you will pretend to enjoy them, and a note explaining that the genie’s owner will retain the lion’s share of the gains from your newfound productivity.
This is fine.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
