161
AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley researchers found the opposite.
(newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu)
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
161 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
82363 readers
3480 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is it a positive for you to be required to deliver 10x the work in the same timeframe as before, while earning the same salary, and while having your job change without warning or negotiation? AI makes it possible to do much more work in a shorter amount of time, but that doesn't translate into more free time - it's just that it becomes expected that you should deliver much more work.
Let me give you an example: imagine you work for a magazine. Before, you worked on a team of 5 designers, who each had a week to come up with two or three sections of the magazine. Now, most of the team is gone, you are creating the whole magazine by yourself using AI, your job changed from writing copy and using photoshop to create art to "prompt engineering". The company expanded its business and now they publish 10 magazines (mostly AI slop) instead of one, because they can.
This is great for those who sell tokens and maybe for your boss, no one else. Workers end up being expected to increase their output multiple times; the fun parts of the job are taken over by AI and you're left doing basically QA all day; the market is runover by AI slop; your boss now has to compete not only with very specialized people, but also with kids using AI.
I can tell you from personal experience working in the consulting world that many people who have been heavy AI users for the last year are now ending up with burnout. I can personally see everything the article mentions going on in my real world bubble.