AI Is Going to Make Us Work Less

How many hours does a life owe to work? The answer is about to change again.

AI is going to make us work less. All of us.

The thought arrived a few mornings ago while I was brushing my teeth, which is apparently where my optimism likes to ambush me. I don’t know whether AI will create as many jobs as it destroys or whether most professions will collapse. That is the argument most people are having, and it is worth a minute of context before I get to what I actually want to say.

The optimists say this is like every previous revolution: some jobs will disappear, new ones will emerge, and people will use AI to become more productive. The World Economic Forum says so, for example (1). The pessimists say this time is different, that machines are beginning to perform intellectual work once reserved for highly educated people. The International Monetary Fund says so, for example (2).

Perhaps.

I have written about this before (“software engineers’ Prometheus moment”), arguing that when our professional skills lose their value, what is threatened is not only our income. It is our sense of relevance: the feeling that we have value in the world, contribute something important, and make a positive impact on others.

But there is another layer that I believe will unfold quite quickly: AI will not only change what we do to make a living. It will change how much of our lives we are expected to spend doing this work.

I will say it plainly: this is an optimistic piece. I intend to earn the optimism with numbers.

Work has been shrinking for 130 years

Look at the past 130 years. The human condition of work has gradually improved. The workday became shorter. The six-day workweek became five. Paid leave, retirement, sick days, and limits on child labor became part of the social contract. Today, a growing number of organizations are even experimenting with four-day workweeks (3, 4).

None of this happened because work suddenly became less important. These changes were fought for through unions, legislation, and political struggle. But rising productivity made them economically possible. Society gradually decided that human life should not be consumed entirely by labor.

AI pushes this process forward.

Why it cannot stay this way

If an employee can complete in two hours what previously required eight, there are only a few possible outcomes. The company can demand four times as much output. It can fire most of the team. Or society can begin converting some of the productivity gain into time.

The first two options may dominate at first. But they are difficult to sustain as a final equilibrium.

An economy cannot function well when a small group works while millions of capable people have no work, and no sense that they contribute. Workers are also consumers, parents, taxpayers, and citizens. Wages are not only a cost that companies pay; they are the money their customers spend, and no one can keep selling to people who no longer earn. A system that converts greater productivity mainly into human exclusion would eventually undermine both economic demand and social stability.

The figure below shows what this means in numbers. As dollars stop arriving in ordinary paychecks for common households, whether because jobs disappear or because pay shrinks, what businesses can sell falls with them. By the time roughly twelve dollars out of every hundred have moved, the drop is already the size of the Great Recession. If you want to see exactly how I built the figure, the note below it is where I geek out.

This all brings us to the mothership: The more stable direction is therefore not a world without work. It is a world in which work occupies less of everyone’s life.

How this figure was built: The Consumer Expenditure Survey reports what American households at each income level earn after taxes and what they spend (5). In 2023, the top fifth spent about 71 cents of every dollar it took in; the bottom four fifths together spent essentially everything (their measured rate slightly exceeds 100 percent, a known feature of the survey, capped here at 100). The line simply adds this up: each dollar that moves from an ordinary paycheck to the top removes about 29 cents from what businesses can sell, about 0.33 percent of total household spending per dollar shifted. The dashed line marks the roughly 4 percent per-person drop of the Great Recession (6). The estimate is conservative: average rather than marginal spending rates, an undercount of the very richest households, and no second-round effects once businesses that lose revenue start cutting jobs.

What Generation Z is telling us

We can already see the cultural preparation for this shift.

People of my generation, those who entered the workforce around the turn of the millennium, were taught to admire sacrifice. In high-tech, working fifty or sixty hours a week was almost a badge of honor. The company was a family. If you left at five, perhaps you were not serious enough.

Many younger workers no longer believe this story. Research on Generation Z consistently finds greater emphasis on balance, well-being, and meaningful work than on climbing the corporate ladder (7).

They want to close the laptop at five because they have a life. This is often described as laziness, entitlement, or fragility. I think it represents something else.

Generation Z may simply be early adopters of a better social norm.

Work can be meaningful. It can make us feel useful, needed, and relevant. But work is not the whole of human existence. We mostly feel relevant by raising children, helping friends, creating, learning, loving, being present, and taking part in communities.

From this perspective, the real promise of AI is that it may finally make the 35- to 40-hour workweek look as outdated as the six-day workweek looks today.

How it actually happens

The same way it happened last time. Ford moved his factories to a five-day week in 1926, not out of generosity: he had concluded that people who work all the time have no time to buy anything, and that his workers were also his customers. The weekend was built partly on the arithmetic of the figure above, and the rest by the unions that demanded it and the laws that made it the default.

All three of those engines are already turning. Trials across six countries have shown that companies can drop a working day without dropping output. In Iceland, such trials ended with unions negotiating shorter hours, or the right to them, for roughly 86 percent of the country’s working population (8). In the United States, the autoworkers’ union put the 32-hour week on the bargaining table in 2023. It did not win. The first people who demanded a weekend did not win either. Ford himself said it in 1926: “The eight-hour day was not the ultimate, and neither is the five-day week” (9).

Here is that century drawn as what it really is: a staircase that stopped, and a next step already penciled in. The note underneath is where I show my homework.

Where these steps come from: The American series is from the economic historians of working time (10, 11); after 1940 the workweek stabilized around forty hours and has not moved. The 48-hour standard was set by the International Labour Organization’s first convention in 1919 (3). The European milestones are documented in Eurofound’s records (12), and the Dutch average, about 32 hours and the shortest in Europe, reflects part-time work that is normal and protected there (13). On the American table now: the four-day trials across six countries (4), the autoworkers’ 32-hour demand of 2023, and a 32-hour bill introduced in Congress.

The transition may be brutal. We will need new taxation, new labor arrangements, and probably several failed experiments.

But the direction seems clear. I said I would earn the optimism with numbers, and the numbers have done their part. The rest of it cannot be measured.

What more time looks like

It looks like picking your kid up from school without checking your phone at the gate. It looks like having the energy to plan a friend’s birthday properly, with the silly details that make it theirs. It looks like noticing the shape of a cloud, for no reason and to no productive end.

A few days ago an hawk stopped in the middle of my street. I had somewhere to be. I stayed for a minute anyway.

That minute produced nothing. It was the best one of my day.

The most human outcome of the AI revolution may be a world in which people have more time to be human.

Be well,

Amit

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References

1. World Economic Forum (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.

2. Georgieva, K. (2024). AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity. International Monetary Fund.

3. Messenger, J. C. (2018). Working Time and the Future of Work. International Labour Organization.

4. Fan, W., Schor, J. B., Kelly, O., & Gu, G. (2025). Work time reduction via a 4-day workweek finds improvements in workers’ well-being. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 2153–2168.

5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2023. Quintile figures as compiled by Hernández Kent, A., & Rodgers, W. M. (2025), That Extra Money: A Primer on Discretionary Income, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

6. Petev, I., Pistaferri, L., & Saporta-Eksten, I. (2011). Consumption and the Great Recession. In The Great Recession. Russell Sage Foundation.

7. Deloitte Global (2025). 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.

8. Haraldsson, G. D., & Kellam, J. (2021). Going Public: Iceland’s Journey to a Shorter Working Week. Autonomy and Alda.

9. Ford, H. (1926). Why I Favor Five Days’ Work With Six Days’ Pay. Interview with S. Crowther, World’s Work.

10. Whaples, R. Hours of Work in U.S. History. EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History.

11. Huberman, M., & Minns, C. (2007). The times they are not changin’: Days and hours of work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000. Explorations in Economic History, 44, 538–567.

12. Eurofound. Records of the French statutory 35-hour week (in force 2000) and the 35-hour week in western German metalworking (introduced 1995). European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.

13. Eurostat (2025). Actual and Usual Hours of Work. European Commission.