I was listening to an a16z podcast this week, two economists going back and forth on what AI does to an economy. The optimistic case goes like this. Productivity jumps, goods get cheaper, we do far more in far less time, and a lot of that surplus comes back to us as leisure. Jobs keep growing too, though they were honest that the transition will be rough, and nobody can tell you which jobs survive it and which ones get invented on the other side.

Then one of them said something that stuck with me. We treat the five-day workweek and the paid vacation as just how work works. They are recent inventions.

Duh. Obvious but one of those things we just take for granted in our modern lives.

Oh and, by the way, the five-day workweek is turning 100 this year.

So I went and checked, because that is the kind of thing I do at 10pm.

The vacation

The vacation came first, and railroads built it. After the transcontinental line was finished in 1869, the railroads started buying land, putting up resort hotels, and marketing the national parks, all to fill their trains. They manufactured the demand for a thing most workers could not yet afford to do. Getting paid for that time off took another 70 years of union contracts. As late as 1940, only about a quarter of unionized workers got even one paid week.

The weekend

The weekend has a stranger origin. A New England mill in 1908 gave its workers both Saturday and Sunday off, mostly to solve a scheduling challenge around the Jewish Sabbath. It stayed a local oddity until 1926, when Henry Ford made the five-day week permanent across his plants, cut hours from 48 to 40, and held pay flat. Ford was not feeling generous. He wrote that rested workers made fewer mistakes, and that a worker with a free Saturday is a worker who buys clothes, food, and a car. He was selling cars.

The federal government did not put the 40-hour week into law until 1938.

A few things to think about as we head into the weekend and think about a post-AI future:

A productivity surplus does not turn itself into leisure, or into new jobs, or into anything good. It sits there as a surplus until someone decides what to do with it. The weekend and the vacation came out of arguments that got won, accidents that got copied, and one company that ran the numbers and made a bet that changed the default for everyone else.

AI is going to hand us an enormous surplus. The economists are probably right about that part. What they cannot tell you is what gets built with it, because that part has never been automatic. It gets decided by companies, by policy, and by whoever moves first and makes the new arrangement look obvious in hindsight.

So here is the question I would put to a leadership team. The productivity gains are coming, so assume that. The harder question is the Ford one: when the surplus shows up, what will you do with it that your competitors have not thought to do yet?

Alex