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Isn’t there a little part of all of us that wishes we could work less and get paid the same?

Is that really too much to ask in the age of AI?

And why did we even settle on 40 hours as the (rarely achievable) modern goal?

Legislators like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders are asking those same questions.

We’ll explain.

But first, smash that button to help us work the same amount and earn a little more.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders released a Sanders-esque video warning that AI and robotics could wipe out 100 million working-class jobs in the U.S. by the end of this decade.

And Sanders offered several specific policy recommendations for how companies can help ensure working-class people benefit from the AI revolution, not just the billionaires at the top. That includes ideas like imposing a “robot tax” on corporations that replace employees, or requiring large companies to give employees an ownership stake.

But the point that really caught my attention was the idea of moving to a standardized 32-hour workweek without any reduction in pay.

Something about the concept of working less is a shock to my capitalistic work ethic, but it also seems like a reasonable idea.

If AI is doing a lot of the knowledge work, can we not just all work a little less?

Is the 40-hour workweek a standard we cannot break?

Or, like most other things, is it just a widely agreed-upon social construct for a specific time period of our history?

And have we outgrown that period of our history?

The origins of the 40-hour workweek started in 1817 when a Welsh textile manufacturer named Robert Owen changed the lives of manufacturing workers forever by popularizing the eight-hour workday.

He coined the slogan:

At this point in the 19th century, it was common to work 48-hour workweeks.

But in practice, things didn’t start shifting until 1926, when Henry Ford did a study on productivity gains from a longer workweek and realized the productivity increase was marginal between 40 and 48 hours. He standardized the 40-hour workweek in his factories.

Ford’s five-day workweek had major ripple effects. He proved that happier and well-compensated workers led to better production with less turnover. Other companies started adopting the five-day 40-hour workweek, and by 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act enshrined the 40-hour workweek and overtime protections into U.S. law.

In the mid-20th century, global policy advisory organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) started advising global governments on fair and proven labor practices for improving the well-being of the global workforce.

Since then, most of the developed countries, especially OECD members, have adopted the general 40-hour workweek framework.

A hundred years ago, it made sense to work less as machines in factories automated physical labor.

Isn’t it a fair question to ask the same thing now as AI is automating mental labor?

One interesting point Sanders made in his video is that AI should not just be used for “productivity increase” but also for increasing wellbeing, happiness and quality of life.

Most of the investments in AI have mainly been towards infrastructure and productivity. Ever since the ChatGPT revolution in 2022, we’ve seen a Cambrian Explosion of AI, agents and bots that “do the work for you.”

There’s no question that we can do “more” with AI. More output and faster. But at what point in the advancement of AI do we do “less”?

One of the more comprehensive studies on the correlation between work hours and life showed a positive relationship between cutting work hours and improving quality of life, sleep and stress levels.

CNBC conducted a poll on LinkedIn a few years ago, and 85% of the people who responded said they were in favor of a four-day workweek.

Many companies have started experimenting with four-day workweeks.

One interesting use case comes from a $5 billion database company called Cockroach Labs, which has adopted a “Flex Friday” system where employees are allowed to use Fridays as the day to do anything that motivates or drives a person — outside of their core work responsibilities.

But if you don’t work for one of those companies, your best hope to cut a day out of your workweek is, unfortunately, Congress.

Last year, Sanders reintroduced the “Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act.”

Even though the bill hasn’t gained much traction over the years, it has at least helped get the conversation started around how much of our time, exactly, we want to devote to work.

Body camera 2.0: The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is using AI to write incident reports, per Fox News. Since the start of the year, deputies have been using Axon’s Draft One to write first drafts of reports, which deputies then review before filing. They’re even using it with body camera footage. Draft One listens to the audio from the footage and writes up a draft based on what it hears.

Wild times: The battle over a huge data center in Tucson made it into the Guardian, which called Tucson “the city that draws the line.” The pushback from local residents was so fierce and widespread that University of Arizona hydrologist Michael Bogan called it “the craziest seven weeks I’ve seen in Tucson.”

Big bucks: An investor group that includes BlackRock is buying Aligned Data Centers for $20 billion, making it one of the biggest data center deals ever made, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meanwhile, Nvidia is backing another investment group that is going to build a huge data center complex in West Texas, right on top of the main hub of the fracking industry. The complex, which will be almost as big as Central Park, will run on the natural gas coming from the Permian Basin, per the Journal.

Partying like it’s 1999: All that money flowing into AI companies is starting to remind analysts of the internet bubble that burst in early 2000, NBC News reports. The debate revolves around whether AI is actually helping companies make money and whether all these giant investment deals are “circular,” meaning the money is just being passed back and forth between companies.

Want to watch some billionaires lose a ton of money? Click that button and we’ll supply the schadenfreude.

Listen to your cows: Dairy farmers are using AI to gather data on their cows, from biometric data to where they roam during the day, the New York Times reports. At one farm in California, wearable tech alerted the farmer that one of his cows was getting sick. He quickly gave the cow probiotics, which helped ward off the illness. Farmers have been using wearable tech for years, but recent advances with AI have taken the data they gather, and how it’s processed, to a whole new level.

Robot royalty: Time just crowned Unitree’s humanoid robot R1 one of the Best Inventions of 2025 — and named founder Wang Xingxing among the 100 Most Influential People in AI. The company itself made Time’s Most Influential Companies list, too. Not bad for a robot that can already out-dance most humans.

Robots work on vacation: China’s AgiBot sent its humanoid robots to tourist spots for National Day — greeting visitors, giving tours, even dancing for the crowd. They’re not ready to run factories yet, but they can charm a family on vacation. Turns out, the road to robot trust might start with a selfie.

AI finds a cancer clue: A new AI model built by Google DeepMind and Yale just did something wild — it generated a fresh hypothesis about cancer cell behavior that scientists then proved true in living cells. It’s early, but the discovery could open a whole new path for cancer therapy.