Or do we want to stay one species and - share the work as the robots and PCs pour into the economy and take over the work, from hardest to easiest?
We say glibly that we need to work smart and not hard, but in practice we are often obsessive about our employees' "face time". In practice, we have no conception of the revolution that technology has created in manufacturing and is starting to create in services. Some sense of this revolution is gained from the story of when Henry Ford took Walter Reuther on a tour of a newly mechanized plant in the late 1930s and Ford said, "Let's see you unionize these robots" and Reuther said, "Let's see you sell them cars."
We assume it's optional to cut hours and keep everyone employed - relying more and more on human versatility as waves of technology sweep over our economy. So we haven't done it for two generations. Now we see that it isn't optional because it imposes an overflow condition on labor and an overflow condition on inventory when the surplus of labor depresses wages and hiring. Who's going to pay much for a surplus commodity, even it's human beings - and especially if it's human beings with all the red tape our foolish government puts us through to hire people.
No no, let's 1/ enforce overtime by using it to trigger reinvestment in training and hiring.
Let's 2/ get a comprehensive under-employment rate that counts our whole dependency problem - welfare, disability, homelessness and prison, plus people forced into part time and self-employment.
3/ If we can't zero our under-employment rate by converting overtime into training and hiring at the 40 hour level, let's resume our long process of gradually adjusting the workweek downward. This will convert our under-employment and dependency problem into a huge and vital market opportunity.