Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, or, as most would write it: ZOOM CEO Eric Yuan, told Techcrunch AI’s going to shorten our work week and whatever:
“Today, I need to manually focus on all those products to get work done. Eventually, AI will help,” Yuan said.
“By doing that, we do not need to work five days a week anymore, right? … Five years out, three days or four days [a week]. That’s a goal,” he said.
This is my periodic reminder that technological progress has not worked this way, ever. As I have written before, AI is, at best, going to be like email:
- It will create an immense volume of more stuff
- Most of it will not be any good, interesting, valuable, or helpful
- We’ll create lousy, bolt-on methods for trying to filter and manage it all, but none of it will work well
- Ultimately, we’ll all be expected to just do more
There is nothing in the American ethos, certainly, or our culture that will ever allow people to just “work less.”
We worked less in 1860 on the frontier than we do today. At least in 1860, you didn’t have much to do as the seasons changed, the sun went down earlier, and no one expected you to do much about it. Sure, there were serious challenges (like being able to eat). But technological progress has just shifted us into an everlasting guantlet of ceaseless business.
