AI Isn't Lightening Workloads. It's Making Them More Intense

thfuran

There's no way under our current economic system that the result of a tool that makes some work easier/faster would be anything other than filling the gap with more or other work.

simianwords

> In fact, AI is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, according to an analysis of 164,000 workers’ digital work activity. Isn't this obvious? This is exactly what I would expect!

QuadrupleA

One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone adds to the workload & fatigue. There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words." You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token? If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.

cyberclimb

https://archive.is/Hsm9U

ahartmetz

Cory Doctorow calls it becoming a reverse centaur: instead of you using machines to automate the boring parts, machines use you to do the messy parts - which includes taking liability(!) for the spicy autocomplete's semirandom output that you totally reviewed 100%, right?

ChrisArchitect

Related: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555081

erelong

> Managers Aren't Succeeding in Using AI to Lighten Workloads ftfy?