The false promise of AI

The same false promise sold for most past technical breakthroughs is now being sold about AI: it will give us more time to spend on meaningful things.

In reality, what comes down instead is the expectation for how long a given task should take, resulting in more work on one's plate than ever before. Even before AI, the number of tasks an average knowledge worker did in a single day in 2022 was incomprehensible for a worker in the 1980s. AI has only hyper-accelerated the trend.

The result: we are producing more "output" per hour; some might even believe that its quality is much better. But, what are we losing in the process?

• Any sense of achievement, since "we" did not do the work and instead feel almost numb, hopping on to the next task.
• The social connections and bonds we built by reaching out for help and discussing ideas with our colleagues.
• The opportunity to truly learn something new, which often comes from grunt work that requires going deep and struggling through every minor detail.
• Trust in others. I think almost everything that most of us receive from others today is either completely or partially generated by AI. That, in itself, is not an issue. I use it for almost all of my work too. The problem is when the task of verifying its quality is passed on to us as well, thus, multiplying our workload.
• The flow state, due to constantly switching between multiple agents working on different things. For many of us, that was a major source of fulfillment at the end of a day.

AI, like any other tool, has both its positives and negatives. But let us stop making the same mistakes we have made many times before and learn from the past. The tool and its sophistication has changed. But people rarely do.