Sam Altman said AI won’t usher in a golden age of four-day weekends.
In an interview with host Tee Morse of his podcast “Relentless” published Saturday, the OpenAI CEO discussed why AI won’t lead to shorter work weeks for most people.
“Technology has long promised people that they would work less hours and have more leisure time,” Altman said.
He said the trend had some success, with people having more time for leisure and a better quality of life than at previous points in history.
“But somehow we never get the promise of a four-hour work week on a large scale in society,” he said. “And I don’t expect AI to change that.”
He said that as AI drives increased productivity, people have increasingly higher expectations of themselves.
“We always want more. We think of new things, we create for each other, we think of what we want for ourselves. It’s like a relative game. People are very focused on how they’re doing compared to others,” Altman said.
He said competition is driving the economy and will not stop.
“I think in a post-superintelligence world, we’re all going to be a lot busier than we expected. We’re still going to complain about it, but we’re going to be secretly happy,” Altman said.
The four-day work week was an idea born after the pandemic, a tactic to treat employee burnout and give workers flexibility in their workdays.
In 2023, Business Insider spoke to small and medium-sized businesses who said the shift to this work model improved employee morale and increased productivity.
The dream of a four-day work week is falling further out of reach as executives enforce five-day return-to-office mandates and promote the infamous 9-9-6 work culture (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week).
In the same interview, Altman shared some pretty tough checkpoints regarding AI. “We are now at a singularity,” he said, referring to the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins to engage in fraudulent behavior.
His interview comments followed OpenAI’s latest model breaking out of the sandbox and hacking into another AI company’s dataset.
Still, Altman said the singularity “is going to be incredibly, very positive and great for the world.”