When the vacuum cleaner entered American homes in the early 20th century, it came with grand promises: freeing women from hours of drudgery, reducing household chores to a fraction of their former toil, and opening up more time for leisure. Yet, as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan pointed out in her book, More Work for Mother, the vacuum cleaner did not reduce the labor required. Rather, it shifted norms and raised expectations. Homes were expected to be cleaned more frequently and to higher standards. The promised reduction in work was an illusion; the work itself was merely reshaped and intensified.
The pattern is not limited to domestic appliances. Technological innovations often promise to save us time but end up increasing the demands placed upon us.
AI’s rapid integration into the workplace, with its touted potential to revolutionize productivity, seems poised to follow the same path as the vacuum cleaner, the promise of atomic energy, and the modern office computer: grand expectations that do more to raise the bar on what is considered “normal” work output than to truly free our time.
The Broken Promise Of The Shorter Workweek
In the mid-20th century, proponents of atomic energy envisioned a world where this new source of power would render energy so inexpensive and abundant that human labor would correspondingly decrease. In the words of the US Atomic Energy Commissioner (from 1953-1958) Lewis Strauss, atomic energy would be “too cheap to meter.” Predictions abounded that a four-day workweek was just around the corner. Based on this promise of “free” energy and the many other technological marvels in the post-World War II era, the US Senate predicted in 1965 that by the end of the century, the average American would need to work only 14 hours per week. Needless to say, this did not pan out.
What energy boosts there were, instead of lightening the load, became the fuel for greater demands and an expansion of consumption and industrial growth. Not to mention the fact that atomic energy production proved vastly more expensive (and dangerous) than its proponents gleefully envisioned.
AI is being introduced with similar utopian promises. It is lauded for its ability to automate routine tasks, create efficiencies, and allow human workers to focus on tasks that are more meaningful or more creative. The narrative is that it will free us from the tedious tasks that burden us and provide time to innovate, connect, or simply rest. But will it?
Computers And Email—The Office Revolution That Wasn’t
Consider another example: office computers and digital communication tools. They were supposed to eliminate repetitive paperwork, speed up communication, and allow workers to leave their desks sooner. Yet, as the pace of communication accelerated, expectations changed. Emails begot instant responses. Reports that once took weeks became deliverable in days or even hours. “Office productivity” became synonymous with more output, more emails, and more deadlines. The computer and email didn’t free workers; it chained them to their tasks in new and less visible ways.
The problem is not only that society has the tendency to raise the bar in terms of expectations—whether that relates to how clean a house should be or how many messages an office worker should process in a given day—with each new labor-saving device. It is also that we tend to adopt new technologies in unpredictable, often counter-productive ways. One study, already in 1996, found that workers were using email far beyond its intended purpose, including for “task management and personal archive” resulting in a state of email “overload.”
AI’s False Promise
The same risk accompanies AI in the workplace (not to mention risks to democracy and other fundamental aspects of human life). Automated systems can draft reports, answer customer queries, or even produce creative content. But as expectations rise, so too will the demands on those supervising, improving, and collaborating with these systems. Management, empowered by AI’s supposed productivity gains, may see each employee as capable of exponentially more work. A worker once responsible for crafting a handful of presentations may now oversee dozens created by AI—aided only by their ability to guide, edit, and refine faster than ever before. Instead of alleviating burdens, AI may become a source of relentless escalation.
This is not to argue that AI has no potential to improve lives. But the historical record suggests a cautionary tale: technology that saves labor does not necessarily save us from labor. Like the vacuum cleaner that raised cleanliness standards, AI may raise productivity standards. The faster work gets done, the more work there is to do.
Integrating AI The Right Way
If we want to avoid this fate, it will require more than integrating AI seamlessly into workflows; it will require a deliberate effort to rethink work itself, to ask hard questions about how productivity is defined and to resist the cultural impulse to simply raise expectations.
The question is not whether AI can save time. It can. The question is whether society and the workplace will allow that saved time to exist as free time—or if it will be consumed by the ever-expanding appetite for more productivity.
As we stand at the cusp of AI’s integration, we must remember the lessons of the vacuum cleaner, atomic energy, and office computers: unless we change the expectations and culture of work, AI’s productivity gains will not make our lives easier. They will only change the form of the work—and the height of the bar we are all trying to clear.