Over the summer, I bought a sweater from Mango for in-store pickup. Between finishing my prep class and moving to Pittsburgh, I forgot to pick it up. Months later, I called the store, and was issued a refund.
That morning, I made $52.36.
Views and to-dos from your Pittsburgh neighbors.
Later that evening, over Meredith Grey’s “pick me” monologue, I exchanged my morning’s “earnings” for a pair of leather gloves that, thanks to my smart investments, came in at a satisfying $0.00.
Simple, basic girl math.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about girl math not as a TikTok trend but as a window into cultural psychology: the way we take an outcome, wrap it in optimism and create a narrative that feels good even when the underlying logic falls apart. That line of thinking kept resurfacing as I attended AI-focused events these past two months: Workday Rising, Oracle AI World and Carnegie Mellon’s Unlocking AI for Public Good with Pennsylvania’s governor’s office.
Across all of them, I kept hearing a familiar refrain: “AI will handle routine tasks so humans can focus on what matters.”
The charitable interpretation goes something like this: AI will analyze medical data, freeing doctors for patient care. AI will grade assignments, giving teachers time for mentoring. AI will handle customer service, allowing workers to solve complex problems.
It’s a lovely sentiment. Truly.
But I can’t shake the feeling that it all sounds suspiciously like girl math optimism: a feel-good narrative built on selective accounting that ignores underlying reality.
The productivity paradox we keep ignoring
We’ve told ourselves this story before.
When email entered the workplace in the 1990s, it was supposed to streamline communication and reduce workload. Instead, today’s office worker receives more than a hundred emails a day and spends over a quarter of the workweek managing them.
Mechanization transformed American agriculture, too. A single farmer with a combine could do the work that once required dozens. But small farmers didn’t gain leisure or income. They were pushed out by industrial operations that scaled faster.
In 2007, the world’s richest person had a net worth of $56 billion. Today, that figure is more like $400 billion. Median wages, adjusted for inflation? Barely moved. All this in an era when technological progress was supposed to lift all boats.
Why we keep believing the story
The “AI will free us to focus on meaning” narrative is seductive because it lets us avoid the harder question: Who captures the value of efficiency? It’s more comforting to believe progress naturally leads to human flourishing than to admit that structural choices, shaped by power and access, determine who benefits.
Across the events I attended, the optimism was genuine. People want AI to help solve many of our intractable societal problems. And technically, it could. But “could” requires political and economic choices unrelated to algorithms. When my doctor or favorite store deploys chatbots, who decides whether efficiency becomes better service or just wider margins?
At Unlocking AI for Public Good, speakers described Pittsburgh’s aspirations to join cities like Seattle and San Francisco as a major tech hub. The vision is exciting: innovation, high-quality jobs, economic growth. But walk through neighborhoods in those cities and the uneven costs of tech booms become visible.
At city scale, the question is the same: Who gains, and who pays?
What actually adds up
I’m not arguing against AI. In fact, I’m annoyingly enthusiastic about an AI-augmented future.
I’m arguing against discussing it as though it exists outside our flawed systems.
If we really want to unlock AI for public good, we need to start with policy and power structures that ensure it does. Until then, we’re just doing girl math at scale.
Simi Olusola-Ajayi is a master’s student in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and a senior experiential strategist at Sparks, where she works with enterprise tech clients including Workday, Oracle and AWS. She is currently preparing applications to law school with the goal of working at the intersection of technology, policy and design. She can be reached at simmyoa@gmail.com.
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