One could be forgiven for thinking that automation tools would make arduous tasks redundant, and make work more relaxing overall. But this elides an important law of the universe: the ratchet of productivity only turns one way. That is, it\u2019s a modern day truism that if automation\u2014AI or otherwise\u2014makes any sort of positive change in your work life, you\u2019ll feel a sort of squeezing sensation, and additional work will materialize to erase any momentary feelings of relief. <\/p>\n
According to a case study highlighted in some \u201cin-progress research\u201d from Aruna Ranganathan, who teaches management at UC-Berkeley and Xingqi Maggie Ye, a Ph.D. student who is part of Ranganathan\u2019s Berkeley program, AI \u201cintensifies\u201d work, and certainly doesn\u2019t make people\u2019s days easier.<\/p>\n
It sounds, in other words, like hell on earth. <\/p>\n
If that is, paradoxically, what you want in your workday, then you probably work in a place like Silicon Valley, or even at OpenAI, where CEO Sam Altman has described AI\u2019s ability to intensify his own work in ways that make him sound strangely awed and humbled (even as he expresses little to no regret about his ambition to annihilate knowledge worker jobs).<\/a> \u201cI don\u2019t think I can come up with ideas fast enough anymore,\u201d he said in an interview in October of last year<\/a>, adding \u201cI think it will mean that stuff just happens faster and that you can\u2026 that you can try a lot more stuff, and figure out the better ideas quickly.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Altman\u2019s experience may resonate with the workers mentioned in the article about Ranganathan and Ye\u2019s research for Harvard Business Review.<\/a> They describe an eight-month study into generative AI\u2019s effects on working life at a company with about 200 employees. Employees \u201cworked at a faster pace,\u201d the authors write, covered a \u201cbroader scope of tasks,\u201d and found themselves working \u201cmore hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.\u201d <\/p>\n This was a workplace that, Ranganathan and Ye explain, didn\u2019t mandate AI use. It just made enterprise AI tools available. This doesn\u2019t sound like a 200-person workplace where widgets were being glued together. Instead, many of the roles described in the article involve engineering, writing code, and communicating in Slack, so it\u2019s safe to say these were knowledge workers and software engineers, quite possibly making use of tools like Claude Code. <\/p>\n Due to AI, many of Ranganathan and Ye\u2019s subjects, it seems, started expanding the scope of their jobs, usurping one another\u2019s roles, and taking on roles coaching others on coding, or correcting their vibe-coded work. Hiring new employees may have been postponed or circumvented altogether, because employees \u201cabsorbed work that might previously have justified additional help or headcount.\u201d <\/p>\n Workers also, it seems, furtively fed tasks into their AI tools while they were ostensibly in meetings, and submitted prompts while on breaks, while waiting for things to load, or while they were supposed to be having lunch. <\/p>\n How you interpret this case study is going to vary. If your workplace is a startup in \u201cfounder mode\u201d and everyone in your office is working punishing hours in exchange for equity in a company that everyone hopes will be a unicorn, I\u2019m guessing you\u2019ll probably love the sound of this\u2014particularly if you\u2019re a CEO\/founder and you\u2019re planning to become a billionaire. <\/p>\n That\u2019s far from a universal experience, however. <\/p>\n According to a 2024 Pew survey, about half<\/a> of U.S. workers reported that they were either somewhat satisfied or \u201cnot too\/not at all satisfied,\u201d and the other half said they were \u201cextremely\/very satisfied.\u201d That \u201cextremely\/very satisfied\u201d group shrinks from 50% to 42% when the respondent has a lower income. <\/p>\n That survey also found that far and away the most satisfying aspects of a job according to respondents are other humans, with 64 percent reporting being \u201cextremely\/very satisfied\u201d with their relationships with their co-workers. Skills development, meanwhile, ranked low, with 37 percent reporting being \u201cextremely\/very satisfied\u201d with that aspect of a given job.<\/p>\n So I don\u2019t get the impression that fewer people, having to learn to do more things, and work that seeps into breaks will help most people\u2019s job satisfaction, but maybe I lack a certain kind of vision.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, if instead of building an app, you\u2019re someone who works as, say, a hospital receptionist or a school administrator, you\u2019re probably not all that stoked about a hypothetical where hiring is postponed, you have to do other people\u2019s jobs, you\u2019ll work on your breaks, and instead of getting new, helpful software, you\u2019re getting enterprise AI tools so you can make your own software<\/a>. <\/p>\n