The most compelling narrative in American work culture right now is not that artificial intelligence will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it.
This is the version that the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who want to buy it. Yes, some white collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst — and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everyone wins.
But a new study published in the Harvard Business Review follows this hypothesis to its true conclusion, and what it finds there is not a productivity revolution. He finds that companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.
As part of what they describe as “research in progress,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when employees truly embraced AI. What they found in more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that no one was under pressure at this company. No one said to hit new targets. People just started doing more because tools made more feel possible. But because they could do these things, work began to bleed into lunch breaks and late nights. Workers’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour the AI freed up and then moved on.
As one engineer told them, “You would have thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you’re not working less. You’re just working the same amount or even more.”
On the tech industry forum Hacker News, one commenter had it same reactionwriting, “I feel this. Since my team has made the jump to an AI, all work styles, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled, and actual productivity has only increased by 10%. I feel like leadership is putting enormous pressure on everyone to prove that their investment in AI is worth it, and we’re all feeling the pressure to try and show them that it’s needed to work longer hours to do so.”
It’s exciting and also disturbing. The argument about artificial intelligence and work has always stopped at the same question – are the profits real? But very few have stopped to ask what happens when they are.
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The researchers’ new findings are not entirely new. A separate test last summer found that experienced programmers using artificial intelligence tools got 19% more at work while they thought they were 20% faster. Around the same time, a National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking the adoption of artificial intelligence in thousands of workplaces found that productivity gains amounted to just 3% in time savingswithout significant impact on earnings or hours of work in any occupation. Both studies have stood out.
This may be harder to dismiss because it doesn’t challenge the premise that AI can augment what workers can do on their own. It confirms this and then shows where all this growth is actually leading to, which is “fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to get away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness increase,” according to the researchers.
The industry’s bet that helping people do more would be the answer to everything, but it may turn out to be the start of an entirely different problem. The research is worth reading, here.
