The link between a 40-hour week and a paycheck no longer makes sense to me. I think it will be gone soon.
Once hours stop measuring work, I think money will stop measuring need, and an old question comes to the front. What is money for?
The hour was a proxy
The 40-hour week is less than a hundred years old. In the United States it came from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which phased it in: 44 hours in 1939, 42 hours in 1940, and 40 hours after that. It was a limit on how hard a factory could push a person, and it said nothing about what that person produced.
Over time the limit became the unit. We price jobs by the hour and judge effort by who stays late. That made sense when output tracked time. A person on a line who worked one more hour made one more hour of parts.
I do not think that link holds now. In my own work, one afternoon of the right change can save a team months. One week of the wrong change can cost them more. The hours tell you nothing about which week it was.
What replaces it
I think work moves to outcomes and priorities. You are paid for what got done and for whether it was the thing that mattered most. The clock drops out of the contract.
That sounds like it would make work harder. I expect the opposite. Work and life will balance, and it will not happen on its own. It happens because the way we approach work changes. When nobody counts your hours, the hours you do not need stop being owed to anyone.
It also changes what an employer has to offer. If pay follows outcomes, and outcomes can come from many places, people will have more choices and more options. What decides between two places is then the culture, meaning how an organization treats the people inside it. Culture fit used to be a soft line on an interview form. I think it becomes the main reason someone stays.
Abundance and the role of necessity
The bigger shift sits underneath. I expect an abundance of most things that used to be scarce, starting with answers and code and, in time, a lot of physical goods too.
Most of us work because we need to. Rent is real, and money is how we pay it. When more of what we need gets cheap or close to free, necessity plays a smaller part in why we work, and money plays a smaller part in our choices.
If money no longer measures need, and hours no longer measure work, then what is money? I do not have the answer. It could be a way to keep score, or a vote for what should exist, and I am not sure it is either. I notice that I had never needed to ask, because the old arrangement answered it for me.
Why people stay in the picture
None of this means a world without people. I cannot imagine one, and I do not think it is a useful thing to imagine. Someone still decides what matters and what to do first. Those are the outcomes the new contract would pay for.
What changes is the baseline. Preferences change. What drives people changes. What they expect from work and from each other changes. A new normal forms, and the people who grew up inside it will find the 40-hour week as strange as the factory shifts that 1938 law was written to limit.
What I do not know
This is a view. I have measured none of it, and I want to be honest about where it is weak.
I do not know how fast any of it happens, or whether it happens evenly. Abundance in one place can sit next to real scarcity in another. Many jobs still pay by the hour for good reasons, such as care work and shift work, where being present is the job. For those, the hour may stay the right unit for a long time.
I also do not know whether outcome-based work is kinder. Paying for results can protect people from presenteeism. It can also push risk onto them, because a bad quarter becomes their problem instead of the company’s. The design of the new contract matters more than the idea behind it.
And I am writing from inside a kind of work that already behaves this way. That makes the pattern easy for me to see and easy to overstate.
The unit underneath the unit
I think the 40-hour week was a way for a society to share the cost of keeping people alive and the value of what they made. The hour was the easiest thing to count.
As the hour gets harder to count by, I expect the question of what money is for to stop being abstract.