While conducting research on how AI was changing daily work at a U.S. technology company, UC Berkeley Haas doctoral student Xingqi Maggie Ye noticed a pattern that raised a provocative question: What if AI is intensifying work rather than reducing it? Ye’s eight-month ethnographic study, co-authored by Associate Professor Aruna Ranganathan and featured in Harvard […]
It’s worth noting that this is an ethnography, so the researchers seem to be essentially taking for granted that the increase in productivity is real and are merely asking what the human effects of using AI are. The vastly increased busyness that the researchers describe follows other descriptions of using AI that I have heard and sounds horrifying. I personally need time to breathe and think, and it sounds like the goal of AI is to take that away.
It’s worth noting that this is an ethnography, so the researchers seem to be essentially taking for granted that the increase in productivity is real and are merely asking what the human effects of using AI are. The vastly increased busyness that the researchers describe follows other descriptions of using AI that I have heard and sounds horrifying. I personally need time to breathe and think, and it sounds like the goal of AI is to take that away.