For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working.
An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025.
Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director’s prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself.
However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.
Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent “crisis meetings”, working on weekends, and “super cut-throat” performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go.
“You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren’t broken,” the person said.
This just made me realize that after we fix our tax structure to tax capital gains and land more than labor we need to change the way the labor tax rate works. We shouldn’t be taxing on total income in my opinion, we should be taxing a rate off of your average hourly income.
So if you work in a factory and make $30 an hour and work 10 hrs overtime a week at 1.5 an hour that’s 85,800, or $33 an hour. But if you work salaried for 100k and work 65 hours a week you make $29.58 an hour. The salaried in this example should be taxed less than the hourly. I am not sure what the new rates would look like, but both the hourly and salaried person would have a lower effective tax obligation after we fixed the first two things.