For Percy Spencer, it was an accidental discovery that would change the modern kitchen forever. A leading researcher and engineer in radar, Spencer was employed by a defense contractor. One day, while standing in front of an active radar set, he noticed the candy bar that was tucked into his front pocket had melted.
Being scientifically minded, he quickly began experiments to replicate this peculiar accident. He placed popcorn kernels in front of the device, creating the first microwaved popcorn.
Subsequent experimentation examined liquids and solid foods, producing exploding eggs and boiling water. He had created the first electromagnetic field generator housed in an enclosed box. The machine emitted microwaves that could safely heat food, and in 1945, he filed the first patent for a microwave cooking oven.
The microwave would revolutionize the kitchen. Advertisements, most often targeting wives and homekeepers, promised efficiency and time costs.
The microwave did indeed reduce cooking times. But it didn’t save us time. That time was filled with other things that might be called ‘more productive’ tasks. Americans began a steady process of reducing not only the time to cook dinner but also many of the staple cultural practices of dinner time.
Over the decades, there has been a precipitous decrease in regular home-cooked meals and the practice of eating dinner around a table. The COVID pandemic offered a temporary boost, but rates have slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels. We are no longer in our kitchens, not because the microwave saved us time, but because we no longer have time for formal meals.
The microwave didn’t cause this shift; it is the result of our society’s ever-present push for productivity, as well as the change in a family’s work-life dynamic, with the average household having two income earners and children increasingly involved in a multitude of activities. Percy Spencer had no way of knowing that in the not-too-distant future, American households wouldn’t even have time to cook food in a microwave.
This trend is not unique to microwaves. There is a parade of inventions and devices that have promised, over the decades, to be time-saving, only to show that, in the end, time is merely shifted to more pressing, time-consuming tasks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making all the same claims as the bygone era‘s technologies. It is promising to save us time and to ease our lives. But history tells us that we will not, in the end, be saved from time; instead, we will find time accelerated and compressed.
AI will not save us time. Instead, the goal posts will move — stretching further toward an event horizon where our experience of time will eventually be a muddled frenzy of nothingness. But AI is assured to accomplish one thing: Workers will be expected to be more productive, but at what cost?
Where Does Time Go?
To have a coherent understanding of what will occur as AI advances into our lives, we have to analyze our cultural relationship to time itself.
In the modern era, we experience a paradox in our relationship to time. We are surrounded by technologies that have reduced the time required for a variety of tasks that once took up a great deal of a person’s day. Most of us no longer haul pails of water from the river to our house to cook. The majority won’t find themselves out in the cold, chopping wood to heat their houses. And I think we can all appreciate the advancement of indoor plumbing. For those of us with even remedial access to modern level benefit from having the most basic of our needs met with little time inconvenience.
Computers and the internet have revolutionized work, productivity, and society in countless ways by speeding up our work. Communication technology has made planet-wide communication near instantaneous.
Despite all these technological advancements, why does time feel so precious and the pace of life so quick?
A paradox is observed with the advent of technology and time. Even though we end up with more time, freed up by a particular technology, we tend to feel like we don’t have enough time. This is primarily due to a process called acceleration — trimming time across a multitude of tasks leads us to do many more things in the same amount of time, speeding up the pace and creating a compressed sense of urgency.
What is particularly fascinating about acceleration is the psychological consequences. As acceleration proceeds, people generally do not feel they are getting more things done. Paradoxically, we feel like we never have enough time in a world that keeps delivering time-saving technologies.
Part of what drives this time paradox is that we do, in fact, save a great deal of time on the time-saving technology. But all time must be filled, and what ends up happening is we simply do more things in less time, creating a process of hyperactivity.
We are all completing hundreds of tasks, many of which are quite convenient, and because they are convenient, we tend not to see these activities as being very productive. I suspect that AI will, in many ways, lower the felt-sense of accomplishment for many workers as a result. If I spend a couple of hours chopping firewood, I will have a stack of wood and a sense of accomplishment. If I type a few key strokes, I might not get the same sense of accomplishment, esteem, and task completion as chopping that wood.
The Industrial Revolution was partially fueled by the drive to increase workforce productivity, but it didn’t account for how workers might feel less productive or derive less meaning from their jobs. But early inventors and engineers would have no idea of the magnitude of productivity that would occur over the centuries. Our economic systems became obsessed with productivity and, as a result, our society is built mostly on this premise.
A Future of Great Leisure That Never Happened
Industrialization brought about a wide variety of utopian visions, in which the dreariness of daily tasks gave way to a swell of leisure time. This is the vision often spoken of when a new technology hits the market. The new thingy will save us time, and in the space created, a new vision for the future will be born.
Early industrialists were quite concerned that citizens, with too much time on their hands, would devolve into a listless community. After all, if folks only need to touch a dial to heat their house, what will they do with themselves?
Consequently, they thought there would have to be high levels of investment in leisure education, where people are taught to pursue hobbies, communal activities, and skill development for personal enrichment and, quite frankly, to fill the time once devoted to work.
This is an interesting idea coming from a social viewpoint that was quite sick at the time. Industrialized labor meant that most people worked 50 to 60 hours a week. Making a more productive workforce, generally speaking, meant packing workers into factories, mines, and mills for most of the available time you could squeeze out of them. With machines replacing human labor, it was thought there would be less need for this level of intensity.
But an economic system built on exploitation and profit isn’t going to take kindly to the notion that people are going to have too much time on their hands.
Feeding the Hungry Machine
In Wall-E, the advent of technology effectively infantilizes humans, confining them to pods where they eat, sleep, and watch video content. But an economy couldn’t be supported by this idea. Instead, time-saving technology was ultimately used to increase the productivity of human laborers.
There is no free time in a techno-capitalist world, especially if billions of dollars are at stake. Space created can be filled…should be filled…by the hustle and grind of a consumer-driven society.
The personal computer, for example, has revolutionized our work. It is hard to imagine the modern office operating without one. But workers aren’t going home early because they can now accomplish in a single day what used to take weeks. Instead, these same workers are working later hours with ever-growing productivity margins and expectations.
The mere price of AI alone is telling of what is to come. There is no way that a technology worth billions in investment is here to make our lives easier. It is here to make someone rich, which means it must dramatically impact productivity to be worth investment. If AI pulls this off, workers’ lives will continue to get busier and faster for those who still have their jobs. Increases in production speed will require workers to do even more.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that AI won’t improve some work tasks. It will. It is already revolutionizing areas such as the administrative burden on healthcare providers, who often spend hours on documentation and insurance paperwork for the services they provide (documentation, mind you, that has increased with the advent of computerized healthcare recordkeeping). But hospitals and healthcare agencies will be quick to have those providers see even more patients to fill the gap left in AI’s wake. Therefore, productivity standards will rise.
AI’s Productivity Problems will Emerge
AI is currently being marketed and portrayed in the best possible light to secure investment. But AI will inevitably create problems (beyond the catastrophic ecological damage that makes AI simply absurd in terms of global long-term costs).
Another prior technological advancement gives us a good example. The advent of email revolutionized how communication was conducted worldwide. What a dream it must have been for ancient people to think about the kind of power I have access to from my computer. I can reply to an email from a professional I am conversing with in the UK and, if our time zones cooperate, get a response near immediately. Email changed the world of communication, but it also created a major problem: we became startlingly less productive due to the amount of time spent engaged in electronic communication with others.
When a communication tool can deliver information instantaneously, the world starts to expect instant communication. It didn’t happen all at once. At first, email was filled with spam that was later countered by the creation of sorting systems and spam folders. As email became increasingly popular, the sheer magnitude of communication increased. It became too convenient to communicate, so the cost of sending an email was nothing. The cost of receiving hundreds of emails, on the other hand, is entirely different. Prior to email communication, it was more cumbersome, which acted as a sifting, sorting, and screening function for the recipient. Messages were only sent when absolutely necessary. Now, the barriers are lifted like levees that once protected a peaceful town.
According to the McKinsey Institute, the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. This comes to 2.6 hours per day or 13 hours per week. Communication tools have undergone improvements to address the downsides of email. Slack and Discord channels organize this deluse a bit better. But for many professionals, their jobs have shifted to being mere communication brokers, and, ironically, this will probably be the jobs replaced by AI tools.
There is a real possibility that AI creates paradoxical productivity issues in the workforce. A few known issues are emerging: prompt generation inefficiencies, AI slop, internet search pruning, model collapse, and so on.
Most of the time, however, the worst parts of a technological advancement are not fully known until it becomes ubiquitous in the workforce. What does seem likely, however, is that we will experience greater time compression and acceleration — leading to a worsening relationship with time.
Assessing Time, Productivity, and Wellbeing in the Workplace
If your workplace is implementing AI tools into the workplace, there are some considerations that you might want to assess:
Why do we think AI is necessary for this task?
Sometimes we want to play with new toys because they are new. It is important to select the right tools for the right job.
What do we hope to gain from AI doing or assisting with this task?
It is important to be clear about what the workplace is hoping to gain from implementing AI. As with anything popular, sometimes we do things because ‘everyone else does it’ (yes — we are still in a high school mentality sometimes). It is important to be clear about goals and outcomes associated with AI implementation. It should be held to a high standard (just like workers).
What are the potential costs of AI doing or assisting this task for us?
Workplaces need to anticipate future problems that AI will create in the workplace. There is no free lunch, as they say. Besides the financial investment, it is vitally important to assess potential negative outcomes arising from AI implementation. For example, Amazon Web Services was catastrophically disrupted for 13 hours after its in-house AI coding tool mistakenly deleted and recreated the digital environment. It is important to consider the costs of overly relying on this technology to replace human labor.
One of the costs is the meaning of our work. Early creators of the assembly line discovered that while the assembly line workers were more productive, they found the work to be much less meaningful than traditional methods of production. That is because screwing in the same bolt day in and day out is soul-crushing work, despite it being the most productive method. Will AI reduce the meaningful parts of your job? Something to think about.
If AI saves time on the task, what will fill that time void instead, and is it worth it? Will AI increase the felt speed of the workday? In other words, will I feel like I need to accomplish more, faster than without it? If yes, how might this impact my psychological and physical well-being at work?
In a perfect world, time-saving technology would give us humans more time off from work. But we live in a world that is never satisfied with the level of productivity earned. AI will only raise workplace productivity standards, and this needs to be clearly anticipated and worked through. Workers need to be safeguarded against unreasonable productivity standards in the wake of AI tools. Simply demanding more will push an already overworked workforce into even more unstable conditions.
Uncertainty in the New Age
As we all navigate the frontier of this new iteration of the digital age, we can bet that things will change dramatically. The prospects and unknowns are enough to fuel both optimists and pessimists. What is clear is that AI will change our relationships with work. How those relationships will change and to what extent they may improve or erode work is still unclear. We all would do well to be vigilant and advocate for what we need in our workplaces moving forward. ∎