AI can accomplish engineering tasks in hours that used to take weeks.
And yet, every engineer I know who works with AI, myself included, is actually working harder and longer than ever before.
How can we explain this?
Is it growing pains, or is it the new normal?
One source of this effect is that AI doesn’t just do work, it also creates work: code that has to be reviewed, emails you have to read, reports you have to deliver. I think what we are going to find is an immense increase in the volume of “work” being done, particularly in fields where the work product is digital or symbolic capitalism, but that most of this additional product is analogous to administrative bloat or self-licking ice cream cones: that is, it is “work about work”, or “self-perpetuating work”.
The fact that we have AIs that can “do the work for us” numbs us to the question of whether the work is worth doing in the first place.
Most major inventions have created exactly the same problem they were designed to solve. The washing machine was meant to be a labor-saving device, but in fact we now spend just as much time on washing clothes as we did before. After the machine, we simply own more clothes and wash them more frequently. The automobile likewise was invented as a way to reduce time spent traveling, which it does at a micro level – but at the macro level, we spend just as much time traveling now. We just spend it differently: sitting in traffic and commuting and getting around in the urban sprawl enabled by cheap, ubiquitous, personal transport.
When computers and the Internet came along, they should have absolutely revolutionized productivity; it’s hard to enumerate just how many tasks that used to take months or years could now be done instantaneously. But the actual effect on productivity was almost nothing (especially at first), a puzzle that still stumps economists.
I am bullish on the future of AI, but bearish on the idea that it will somehow free us from the burden of work as no invention has in the past. I think it’s much more likely that, as with every single past technological revolution, the way we live and work is going to change dramatically, and that these changes will absorb all of the efficiencies that AI brings and then some. Standards of living will change, jobs will change, but people are going to be working as hard as ever because of a combination of hedonic adaptation, competition, and the economic necessity of work.