Sam Altman said AI won’t usher in the golden age of the four-hour 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 idea of shorter, more flexible workweeks emerged post-pandemic as a way to address employee burnout and give workers greater control over their workdays.
In 2023, Business Insider spoke with small businesses that said transitioning to a four-day 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 said AI is now in “the singularity,” a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and may begin going rogue.
His comments followed OpenAI’s latest models breaking out of their sandbox and hacking into a dataset from another AI company, Hugging Face.
Still, Altman said the singularity would be “incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”
