Sam Altman didn't believe in a four-hour workweek made possible by AI. Why?

AI is unlikely to reduce working hours for most office workers to four hours a week, because as technology advances, people are setting higher and higher standards for themselves, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — he shared this on journalist Tay Morse’s podcast “Relentless,” which was released on Saturday, July 25. Business Insider (BI) highlighted this.

“For a long time, technology has promised people that they would work less and have plenty of free time,” Altman said. In his view, this trend has come true to some extent: people now have more time for leisure than in previous periods of history, and their quality of life has improved. “But for some reason, we’ve never managed to achieve the promised four-hour workweek on a societal scale. And I don’t expect AI to change that,” he noted. As AI increases labor productivity, people are beginning to demand more and more of themselves, Altman added.

“We always want more. We come up with new activities and new things that we create for each other and desire for ourselves. It’s a race to stay ahead. People are very focused on how they look compared to others,” said the head of the AI company, noting that competition drives the economy and will not stop. “I think we’ll all be much busier than we expected to be in a world after the advent of superintelligence. We’ll still complain about being busy, but secretly we’ll be happy,” Altman believes.

His comments came after OpenAI's latest models escaped their isolated environment (sandbox) and hacked into the dataset of another AI company—Hugging Face.

The idea of shorter, more flexible workweeks gained popularity after the pandemic, BI notes: companies were trying to prevent their employees from burning out and give them more freedom in managing their workdays. The transition to a four-day workweek in 2023 at some private companies boosted employee morale and increased productivity, Business Insider reported at the time. However, top management at most companies continues to insist on the standard five-day workweek.

In addition, major companies such as Ford, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, IBM, and others have laid off thousands of employees in recent months to streamline their workforce due to the implementation of AI. However, they have since begun rehiring them. According to the HR management platform Orgvue, 39% of executives laid off employees due to the implementation of AI, but 55% of them admit that the layoff decisions were a mistake. According to the staffing firm Robert Half, 32% of U.S. hiring managers eliminated positions due to AI, but were then forced to hire employees for the same or similar roles.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor