Will AI really save time overall or just push us to complete tasks more quickly so we can do more tasks without saving time? If you have eight hours, you finish 20 tasks instead of the usual ten, but you still work your full eight hours or more.
No time is saved unless you hold to the same total number of ten tasks…but then do you do them at a deeper level of complexity and quality, so they take longer to do with an AI’s help?
An Old Pitch, Still Untrue
Mandy Brown at A Working Library shares:
…she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners.” Saval, Cubed, page 40
“The present-day fiction of so-called AI is the same story, second verse. The people urging AI on us won’t save labor; they will try to degrade that labor, to further alienate us from it, to demand that we work as long and hard and hopelessly as ever. Unless we refuse.”
Unless we refuse? Not sure that is an option, is it? It never has been.