https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/billionaire-bill-gates-two-day-workweek-ai-replacing-humans/
Say hello to a 5-day weekend: Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says artificial intelligence may soon automate almost everything—and with it, usher in a 2-day work week in less than a decade.
The capitalist class, who fully control the means of production, seek to further gut their variable costs of buisness by rendering obsolete the labor of as much of humanity as possible.
By as much of humanity as possible, my measured guess is that the plot is to get fully automate the bullshit jobs, and as much of the logistics network as possible, plunge the service, hospitality, and other labor-intensive sectors into hypercompetative hell as the reserve army of labor swells by the millions.
Long story short, the nonessential pmc labor aristocracy will be thoroughly liquidated and the wider working class will face intensifying conditions that will bring them closer to the standard of living that the global south slaves away in.
If you are not a fan of the 9-to-5 weekly grind, there’s good news: Bill Gates is predicting that in just 10 years, humans might just work two days out of the week—and it’s all thanks to AI.
Load of shit. Every capitalist industrial revolution plunges sections of the working class into poverty as their labor becomes unnecessary for production.
At the current pace of innovation, the Microsoft co-founder predicts that humans will no longer be needed “for most things,” and so a rethinking of the workplace will soon be in order.
“Most things” being shit the speak-and-spell bots can do easily. Someone’s still gotta stock the shelves, load cargo containers, and make brunch for the shitlibs
“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like 2 or 3 days a week?” the billionaire told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.
Poverty laws and police raids
This is not the first time the billionaire alluded to a shortening of the workweek. In 2023, when ChatGPT was still in its infancy, Gates said society might “eventually” get to a scenario where working three days a week is the norm—and the world will have to figure out what to do with more leisure time.
Their world, not our world. Not that they work in the first place.
“If you zoom out, the purpose of life is not just to do jobs,” he told Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast.
"… while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
~ Marx, German ideology.
Only under a socialist and then communist system can the worker truly be liberated so as to pursue the craft they desire. Anything else that presents itself as liberation is but simply the exchange of chains disguised as gifts.
A 5-day weekend could boost birth rates and kill burnout
Any workweek reduction is likely music to the ears of many workers who are battling burnout, exhaustion, and disconnect—especially following the pandemic. And there are indications that the shift to a four-day workweek, in particular, is beneficial.
Hey where’s that one handy chart about worker productivity vs what they’re getting paid. That probably has absolutely nothing to do with this.
One company found that cutting work by one day increased productivity by 24% and cut burnout in half.
Yeah no shit
While the widespread adoption of a shortened worksheet hasn’t caught on yet, the pendulum is moving. For example, Tokyo’s Metropolitan government recently announced a turn to a 4-day workweek—in part to help boost birth rates in Japan.
There’s a lot of shit wrong with the Republic of Mitsubishi, but hey, this is one instance you could say they’re moving in a more progressive direction when compared to the United corporations of burgerland.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, has also expressed his view that AI will make working less of a priority—placing his bet on a three-and-a-half day workweek.
Blow it out your ass, Jamie.
However, there are no indications that his company is heading in that direction anytime soon due to the new enforcement of a strict five-day return-to-office policy.
Case and point
The 2 professions likely to be replaced by AI, according to Gates
As AI takes aim at the workplace, Gates admitted there will be professions that see much more change than others. In his conversation with Fallon, he singled out doctors and teachers as two pathways that will experience replacement—but to the benefit of society as a whole.
Ain’t no fucking chance you’re replacing doctors and teachers with a fucking tickle-me-elmo chatbot. Imagine combining the fucking chatbot that told you to iron your balls to unwrinkle them with the mayo clinic website info and you’re more likely to end up worse off than being a medieval folk remedies practitioner. Don’t even get me started with the fucking nightmare of letting a fucking chatbot educate the youth holy fucking shit dude
“With AI, over the next decade, (intelligence) will become free, commonplace—great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.
To quote the song “The Gates” by Da Vinci’s Notebook (great band by the way.)
" Well, the Gates been a’runnin’ ever since that day
Thinks he can hide but he can’t get away
When I finally find his little skinny behind
Gonna kick it all over this town-o, town-o, town-o
Finally find his little skinny behind
Gonna kick it all over this town"
To put it mildly.
While he says humans will reserve some jobs—like playing professional baseball, for example—he pictures a world where AI is doing close to everything.
YOU WILL ENTERTAIN THE RULING CLASS, PEASANTS! THAT WILL BE YOUR ONLY PURPOSE! DANCE OR STARVE, YOU HAVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE!
“There will be some things that we reserve ourselves for, but in terms of making things and moving things and growing food—over time, those will be basically solved problems,” Gates said.
No they fucking won’t. Migrant slave labor is used to put food on the table, and thanks to Trump it’s gonna be child slave labor soon.
Fucking billionaire demons.
We already invented the technology to let everyone work two days a week, it’s called a combine harvester.
meanwhile Microsoft Execs are crying that people aren’t working 80hr work weeks. come on lol who believes this shit
After $1B invested over 15 years, the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promised agricultural prosperity.
Instead, AGRA delivered ecological damage, farmer debt, and increased hunger, leaving target countries worse off than before the program began
Gates-backed Alliance for a
GreenColor Revolution in Africa
Only someone who doesn’t know anything about food and agriculture would think the green revolution was a net positive.
“Soon, due to AI, people will only be working two days a week.”
“So that means we’ll work fewer hours but our pay won’t go down, right?”
“…right?”If only this could be real…
Damn if only there was some historic example of worker compensation not keeping pace with productivity we could point to as an indicator of how the future will play out.
Ain’t no fucking chance you’re replacing doctors and teachers with a fucking tickle-me-elmo chatbot.
he means replacing the doctors and teachers for poor people. see, this way “everyone” will have “access” to “healthcare” and “education” at a fraction of the cost!
And curiously enough, every place will turn you down with your PhD from ChatGPT university.
well sure, a phd from gippity u. is the bare minimum qualification and you’re acting like it’s some kind of entitlement!
its only the bare minimum qualification until you’re overqualified. i hope you don’t feel entitled to a job
Lol who the fuck is gonna consume shit then with those slave wages? And how much of the earth would you have to burn to make this viable? Lol just lol. Lmao just lmao
Literally the rich.
The rich genuinely think that it’s up to them to do all the consuming to prop up the economy like they aren’t total misers.
the wealthier 5 to 10 percent of the US population already consumes more than half of all economic activity
this is just the tail end of a process where economies in north america and europe are retooled to attend the needs of the wealthy. the real brazilification of the ‘first world’.
The problem that any Marxist can point out is that surplus labor is the source of profits. A sharp decrease in the aggregate surplus labor will directly cause a decrease in profits and collapse the domestic economy. It doesn’t matter how much they are able to consume because the abstract logic of capitalism demands an expanding spiral of exploitation.
The only way out of this is through monopoly rent extraction (superexploitation) from the rest of the world, which they might succeed at for a while (and already do to some extent) but it is inherently unsustainable, especially if your domestic working class is threatening mutiny.
There’s this phenomenom brazilians like to call ‘chicken flight’. Basically, the experience of economic development in much of the Global South is sudden spurts followed by sudden stagnation. Because as you said at one point the material conditions of the economy don’t add up. It doesn’t matter how much the rich consume when labor can’t afford to work for them. So minimal redistribution happens, with the acquiescence of, maybe, half of the capitalist class. The middle class manages to afford some treats here and there. And then its all seized up once again.
Gates probably thinks that capitalism will abolish itself eventually and now he can live as a pseudo-Pharaoh overseeing a nations of worshiper living god type of deal.
Tangential but related thought: In a just world anyone trying to proselytize “effective altruism” would immediately get struck by an orbital rail gun barrage. Nip that shit in the bud.
Hey, uh, construction worker here… Even if this worked out perfectly and nobody involved got screwed over
I’m still going to be working 5 days a week aren’t i?
Yup. And you get the luxury of your job becoming more competitive so you better work on your brown nosing skills because that’s going to be as important as your actual labor skill to keep your job away from the hordes of child slaves gunning for your work at lower pay
Honestly just like when COVID first came out. Everyone else is getting told to stay home or work from home and I’m still driving in to the germ factories that have non-mandatory masking.
At least there’ll be less traffic
Traffic’s gonna be the roving groups of homeless people being forced to migrate because of the dog bots setting fire to their previous temp settlements.
If the roving homeless people wanted me to agree with their protest they shouldn’t have blocked traffic making it take longer for me to get home from the mega factory
Dont worry the premium work life package will contractually oblige you to replace your hands with two 40mm Circular Saw Galvanized Steel Bar Cutters ,but dont get them broken! thats company property!
But, but sir… How will i hug my child with saws for hands, sir?
“You can, but probably just once.” - HR department
Yeah, if true it’ll mean even the white collar workers will still be working five days a week, there’ll just be less than half as many of them
BRB inventing new construction equipment with new AI technologies like “hallucination”.
Taking this at face value (which I don’t necessarily believe). If AI can achieve this level of replacement of labour then it can be put to work in independent communes that provide everything for free. The robots will build more robots which will do labour and humans can simply get everything from this for free.
The rate of profit will collapse to zero. What does capitalism do when that happens?
If they genuinely believe that robots can replace most labour soon, then the only way they can control that labour and prevent it from destroying their system is by preventing everyone except themselves from having access to the robots.
If communists get access to robots that can replace labour communism is completely inevitable because “we’ll give you everything for free, come live in our community” will out compete capitalism.
They MUST create a monopoly over this labour and prevent the working class from having access to it in some way or they’re fucked.
With that said, I don’t actually believe this hyperbole. I think he’s a salesman selling AI, not necessarily correct. But if he were correct then the above seems logical to me.
Real Leftists™ wouldn’t dare sully their hands with AI.
If it works I would lol, the problem is that as it stands the uses I find for it are fairly minimal. It’s pretty great at sorting through large quantities of information faster than I can by myself, I give it that. And it is kinda useful when I want like some really meaningless thing like a joke to tell to spice up an announcement post in a community.
But for real work? I find little use.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been using python and APIs to build automated workflows for a good chunk of my life already, but I see a lot of potential for building smarter “gears” for mechanisms I already have in place, and have in the pipeline. It’s far, far from done, but I have a python script that’s literally just running a loop of pulling from a queue on a php/mysql server, running the query on the assigned model, and then popping the output back on the db as a JSON to be parsed. A bunch of my other personal services use the queue to drop their queries throughout the day, meaning that I can basically just drop a function into a python or php script and instantly have access to more creativity and versatility for a service without any additional cost or stress on my part. And I haven’t even experimented with finetuning models or adding layers of recursion yet.
If it worked consistently, it would be a different deal! But like, it doesn’t. Every LLM I’ve ever used has fucked up stuff that it really shouldn’t. In particular, to get some specificity in the conversation, let me say that I always test them with complicated arithmetic. “Oh, it’s the wrong tool for the job! LLM’s can’t do arithmetic, their use is for other things,” I hear you cry. But like, for my work, complicated arithmetic is pretty key. And the thing that annoys me isn’t so much that the LLM is wrong, it’s that it asserts that it’s right, while being extremely wrong. “Here’s the answer to your question:”, says the LLM, while serving up nonsense. What use am I supposed to make of that? What good is something that won’t tell you, in fact can’t tell you, that something has gone wrong? If I’m asking an LLM for the answer, but then having to double check every step and correct half of them, why bother? I love technology, I love algorithms, I love making a computer do the hard work for me, they’re great at that. I have yet to understand why I should trust a black box algorithm that is as easy to fool or mislead as an LLM is. And they are easy to fool. I dunno, I think I will always feel a distaste for a tool that claims to be all-knowing but is less accurate than a cheap scientific calculator from 20 years ago.
Bit idea: Create machines whose sole purpose is to do things for machines whose sole purpose is to do things for machines, recursively. Humanity no longer needs to exist the only thing that matters is the economy.
You’re describing NFTs.
NFTs are a bit right
Fuckin’ Mega-City 1 did more to alleviate their economic problems than the USA is doing now
And they had a Job Lottery
Peach Trees in the 2012 film only had 96% unemployment and the judges gave a homeless man until the end of the day to move away from the dangerous automatic gate that could crush him if he got stuck. This is considered dystopian.
In real life, we’re going to have 99.7% unemployment and the 0.3% of people employed will be cops who just shoot people randomly, regardless of their housing situation or if they’ve broken the law.
As far as I’m concerned, this is why porky’s gotten so picky.
It’s just a culling event, no different to how farmers treat livestock. Why raise 100 chickens to lay 100 eggs when you can have just one prize chicken that lays 100 eggs and then cull the rest?
The porks are literally just playing God at this point, and jobs are their way of deciding who lives and who dies.
These rich ghouls are literally the dark judges
THE CRIME... IS LIFE!
The power loom could’ve been used to make textile laborers and artisains work less for the same amount of pay. But did it? Of course not. Because the power loom was capital owned by the nascent bourgeoisie. The luddites saw this, and tried to stop it.
Whats the deal with this made up correlation they have between productivity and workers rights?
In a world where machine learning algorithms could save the amount of labour he claims they can, zero capitalist states would use the increased productivity to give workers more free time rather than increasing their outputs.
It’s called the “carrot tied to a bit of rope and hung from a stick” maneuver.
Love to see people who’ve never worked a day in their life talking about what “AI” will or will not do.
Wow its a relief that western governments are not recommending s**icide because one is poor! Oh wait they do.
