How AI could make us work even harder - Phys.org

TEXT START: Technological progress has taken more than its fair share of the workload from humans over the years.

The Dissection

The article identifies a real transitional symptom: workers facing automation may work longer hours to signal usefulness, while employers inflate productivity expectations and impose continuous retraining. But it mistakes the convulsion for the disease.

AI-driven overwork is not evidence that human labor remains structurally secure. It is the extraction phase before displacement: the surviving workforce is squeezed harder while the economic need for human labor contracts.

The Core Fallacy

The article assumes workers can restore bargaining power by becoming more skilled, more productive, or more involved in AI’s design. That assumes employers will continue to need human labor at sufficient scale to make worker scarcity valuable.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, AI eventually automates the cognitive capabilities that create that leverage. Augmentation is therefore a temporary moat, not a durable settlement. If AI is cheaper and superior, competition forces substitution regardless of whether workers prefer empowerment.

The article also treats work-hour reduction as the central objective. The deeper failure is the collapse of productive participation itself. A shorter workweek does not solve mass dispossession if income, ownership, and economic status remain tied to employment.

Hidden Assumptions

• Mass employment will remain the dominant distribution mechanism.
• Employers will need workers badly enough to bargain with them.
• Skills enhanced by AI will not themselves become automatable.
• AI firms and employers can be compelled to prioritize augmentation over substitution.
• Collective worker action can overcome competitive pressure to automate.
• Redistribution can preserve the existing social order without transferring control of AI capital.
• Human-only economic domains can remain stable at scale.

These assumptions are precisely what P1, P2, and P3 invalidate.

Social Function

This is a partial truth wrapped in transition management and ideological anesthetic. It accurately describes the immediate rat race, but converts a structural ownership crisis into a workplace-design problem.

The proposed remedy—better AI, worker empowerment, and bargaining—allows the reader to imagine control without confronting the decisive question: who owns and controls the productive systems after human labor is no longer necessary? Without that control, “augmentation” becomes a temporary justification for demanding more output before replacement.

The Verdict

The article is correct that AI may make employed workers work harder in the short term. It is wrong to imply that this is the central or final danger. Overwork is the labor market’s death rattle: intensified labor for the remaining workers, followed by declining bargaining power and eventual exclusion for the rest.

Its conclusion is not a solution to the Discontinuity. It is a humane description of the hospice period.