AI Is Doing More of Our Work — So Why Are We Busier? - Digital Information World

TEXT START: As artificial intelligence (AI) began to gain traction in the working world, two schools of thought emerged about what it would mean for workers.

The Dissection

The article documents productivity capture while pretending to describe a workplace adjustment. AI removes portions of production, but employers convert the reclaimed capacity into higher throughput, new monitoring tasks, more communication, and permanently elevated expectations. The surplus does not become leisure because workers do not control it.

Its “somewhere in between” framing is the central concealment. This is not a stable middle ground between mass unemployment and liberation. It is the transitional phase in which labor is intensified before enough of its remaining functions are automated or economically consolidated.

The Core Fallacy

The article treats the question as whether AI saves time or eliminates jobs. The decisive question is who owns and controls the AI capital. A worker can save an hour and still lose bargaining power, wages, and eventually the job.

Fact-checking, editing, prompt-writing, meetings, and “managing AI” are not durable human moats. They are compensating tasks created by imperfect systems. As AI improves, the verification layer itself becomes cheaper to automate. The article mistakes temporary scaffolding for a permanent economic role.

Hidden Assumptions

• Productivity gains will remain attached to individual workers rather than being absorbed by employers.
• Human review will remain necessary at roughly its present scale.
• Creative, strategic, and interpersonal work will remain scarce enough to protect mass employment.
• Employers will accept higher output without continuously raising the baseline.
• Workers can preserve relevance through visibility and extra projects, despite competing against systems that scale without fatigue or wages.
• The survey’s snapshot represents a durable equilibrium rather than an early transition state.

The most revealing assumption is that workers are “filling” their freed time by choice. In a wage system, unused capacity is rapidly converted into demanded output. Calling that voluntary disguises coercion as personality.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic.

The article accurately records work intensification, unpaid productivity gains, and the emergence of AI-supervision labor. But it individualizes a structural transfer. Workers are blamed for not reclaiming time, while ownership, bargaining power, and capital’s ability to reset the productivity benchmark remain largely invisible.

Its reassurance is that employees are not yet replaced. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is not evidence of safety. It is evidence that the system is extracting maximum value from the human layer before removing more of it.

The Verdict

This is a useful symptom report wrapped in a false equilibrium. AI is already severing the link between labor time and compensation: workers produce more, earn no more, and receive no more freedom. The current “AI manager” role is hospice care for the old employment model, not a new settlement. Once cognitive automation reaches durable superiority and institutions fail to preserve human-only domains, the productivity ratchet stops being a workload problem and becomes a participation-collapse problem.