Cal Newport, Computer Science PhD and Professor at Georgetown University, explains AI, LLMs, and the like better than anyone else I follow. His newsletter from last month, Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier?, explains some of the reports we’ve begun hearing through the media noise.
He writes:
I’ve been studying the intersection of digital technology and office work for quite some time. (I find it hard to believe that my book, Deep Work, just passed its ten-year anniversary!?) Here’s a pattern I’ve observed again and again:
(And, yes, I’ve lived through these…and more.)
- A new technology promises to speed up some annoying aspects of our jobs.
- Everyone gets excited about freeing up more time for deep work and leisure.
- We end up busier than before without producing more of the high-value output that actually moves the needle.
- This happened with the front-office IT revolution, and email, and mobile computing, and once again with video-conferencing.
Will AI be anything different?
I’m now starting to fear that we’re beginning to encounter the same thing with AI as well.
My worries were stoked, in part, by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense.”
Based on some actual research:
The piece cites new research from the software company ActivTrak, which analyzed the digital activity of 164,000 workers across more than 1,000 employers. What makes the study notable is its methodology: it tracked individual AI users for 180 days before and after they began using these tools, providing clear insight into what changed. The results?
“ActivTrak found AI intensified activity across nearly every category: The time they spent on email, messaging and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business-management tools, such as human-resources or accounting software, rose 94%.“
Ah, not everything was affected.
The one category where activity was not intensified, however, was deep work:
“[T]he amount of time AI users devoted to focused, uninterrupted work—the kind of concentration often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating and strategizing—fell 9%, compared with nearly no change for nonusers.”
Why?
It’s not quite clear why AI tools are having this impact. One tantalizing clue, however, comes from Berkeley professor Aruna Ranganathan, who is quoted in the article saying: “AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum.”
I lived through these changes and concur:
This points toward a pattern similar to what happened when email first arrived. It was undeniably true that sending emails was more efficient than wrangling fax machines and voicemail. But once workers gained access to low-friction communication, they transformed their days into a furious flurry of back-and-forth messaging that felt “productive” in the abstract, activity-centric sense of that term, but ultimately hurt almost every other aspect of their jobs and made everyone miserable.
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