In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why far fewer people are needed to do the work. If, for the moment, we take that assertion at face value, this still leaves an obvious alternative path: instead of reducing the number of workers, companies could reduce the amount of working time. That is, rather than laying off twenty percent of the workforce, they could have everyone work twenty percent less. In fact, I’d venture that a great number of knowledge workers would be more than happy to take a twenty percent pay cut in exchange for a four-day work week.¹ Time is very often more valuable than cash.

But the steady drumbeat of layoffs suggests that no member of the C-suite has even considered this path. Why not?

It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 45

Gorz is writing more than two decades before the current crop of LLMs hit the market, but of course the seeds of our present predicament were planted long ago: in the years before the dot-com crash, we also saw a small number of privileged people earning large sums of money while working egregiously long hours in overpriced but ostensibly comfortable chairs.

Perhaps if something is different now it’s the scale of the threat: in the years since that first tech bubble, the number of tech and tech-adjacent jobs have soared. Meanwhile, the leaders of tech companies today claim that AI will take all the work away, that no job is safe. It is hard to maintain the “correct” attitude to work in light of such apocalyptic claims. Which begs the question, what attitude is taking its place? What happens when we no longer see ourselves as “small entrepreneurs”? We’re on our way to finding out.