End The 40-Hour Work Week: Google Founders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, gave a joint interview to Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. They talked about various topics ranging from self-driving cars and artificial intelligence to health projects and the unnecessary complexity of government.
Page, Google's CEO, talked about the need for business leaders to maintain a 20-year vision instead of a 4-year vision and mentioned the criticism he got from Steve Jobs ("You guys are doing too much stuff.") He also spoke about his belief that society doesn't actually need everyone to work full-time anymore.

"If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids — anthropologists have been identifying these things. It's not that hard for us to provide those things," he said. "The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I'm guessing less than 1% at the moment.

Nevertheless, he acknowledged people need "things to do" and "need to feel like you're needed," - desires that are fulfilled through labour. He also came up with a solution for this: reduce the work week and split one full-time job into multiple part-time jobs.

"You just reduce work time," Page said. "Most people, if I ask them, 'Would you like an extra week of vacation?' They raise their hands, 100% of the people. 'Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?' Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they'd also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the work week. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs."