CONCEPT
Radical Work-Time Reduction
Gorz's proposal that working hours shrink in proportion to productivity gains so that the benefits of technology are distributed as time rather than concentrated as profit — and the demand AI has made both technically possible and politically urgent.
In 1980, Gorz proposed a concrete schedule: from a forty-hour week to thirty-five in the first four years of microelectronic automation, to thirty and a half by year eight, and continuing proportionally as productivity grew. The proposal was technically straightforward and politically explosive because it required the productivity surplus to be distributed as time rather than concentrated as profit. It challenged the assumption on which the growth economy depends: that productivity gains should be converted into increased output rather than reduced input. The AI transition, with its twenty-fold productivity multipliers, makes this demand newly urgent. A forty-hour work week could, in principle, become a two-hour work week with no loss of output.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The growth economy requires perpetual expansion — more production, more consumption, more growth — because the social structures that depend on it (employment, taxation, social insurance) are calibrated to a continuously expanding pie. Reducing work