Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently made a surprising statement in a public interview—AI will not bring the golden era of working four days a week as many people expect. For a long time, every technological revolution has been accompanied by the assumption that technological progress would reduce working hours and provide more leisure time. However, Altman pointed out that this idealized vision has never been widely realized over the decades, and AI will be no different.

Altman admitted that, looking at historical trends, modern people do have more free time for leisure compared to workers hundreds of years ago, and the overall quality of life has reached heights unimaginable in the past. However, the widespread adoption of AI technology will rapidly boost the overall productivity of society. At the same time, the expectations individuals have for themselves will also rise quickly, and there will be no widespread trend of relaxing and reducing workloads.

Unending relative competition drives everyone to be busier rather than more relaxed

In Altman's view, human society's overall needs will never remain at the current level. After productivity increases, people will constantly come up with new things to accomplish, creating new services and products for each other, which in turn give rise to entirely new demands that did not exist before. The operation of society is more like an unending relative competition—everyone is very concerned about where they stand compared to others around them. This drive continuously pushes the economy forward and will not stop because of the arrival of AI.

He even gave a counterintuitive prediction: once the era of super intelligence is fully implemented, everyone's actual condition will be much busier than expected, complaining about how much time work takes, but secretly enjoying it. The reality seems to support this judgment—currently, many tech company executives around the world are actually reinforcing strict rules requiring employees to work five days a week in the office, and some regions are even subtly promoting a 996 overtime culture. The originally hoped-for ideal of a four-day workweek seems to be getting further away from the public.