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Should we be frightened of Ebola?
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When I was growing up, I walked 30 minutes to school. My father had to bike for more than two hours for his day-to-day work. My mother did most of the crop-growing work manually. My teacher used a manually operated mimeo machine to make copies of test papers. My classmates and I spent many hours in the school library, though by today’s standards it did not look like a library.
Fast forward to today. My children’s school is two minutes away, and they take the school bus. If I do not want to walk much, I can walk only from my house to the driveway, and from the parking lot to my office, altogether under 100 steps. Machines now do much of the agricultural work that once consumed the bodies of farmers. Students, teachers, and professors can ask an AI chatbot almost any question that comes to mind. A person no longer needs to physically search shelves of books to begin learning.
In my own work, AI-assisted tools can help me respond to emails faster, review literature faster, and draft factsheets faster. Almost every task seems to have become easier, faster, or more convenient. But the day does not feel lighter. It feels denser.
Technology keeps saving time, but the saved time rarely returns to us as freedom. It is usually converted into more output, faster response expectations, higher standards, more documentation, and more communication.
If an email once took 15 minutes and now takes five, the inbox does not shrink. It expands. If a factsheet can be drafted in one-fourth the time, we still do not get the afternoon back. We may be asked to produce more factsheets, add graphics, create social media posts, and organize a webinar. Generative AI can improve productivity in writing, customer service, and other knowledge tasks. These gains are real. But who gets the benefit of that saved time?
Our economic system is very good at converting efficiency into profit, scale, and competition. If one worker can do more with technology, the first question is often not, “Can that worker now have a calmer life?” but the question is, “How much more can this worker produce?”
At the top of the economy, the time dividend is easy to see. For example, Nvidia, whose chips power much of the AI boom, saw its market value rise from about $400 billion at the end of 2022 to $5.4 trillion by May 2026. This shows that the financial rewards of efficiency are being captured very quickly somewhere. Are ordinary people receiving any comparable dividends?
We have also begun to organize ordinary life around work. A cousin of mine recently bought a water bottle, and the first thing he connected it to was work: something to take to the workplace, to stay hydrated while being productive. We have microwaves so food can be warmed in seconds, often not to enjoy a meal slowly, but to eat quickly and return to work. Even convenience has become part of the work system. Survival used to require labor, but now, life itself seems organized mainly to support work.
Should it be for more emails, more reports, more meetings, more assignments, and more metrics showing a higher impact of our work? Or should some of it be returned to families, neighborhoods, civic life, sleep, walking, thinking, reading slowly, and simply being unavailable for a while?
Another side of this is that we may be living through a transition. AI is already moving beyond screens and into machines. Service robots are becoming more common in workplaces, and companies are testing humanoid robots in factories and warehouses. In the near future, personalized robots may help with cleaning, cooking, and a wide range of personal and professional tasks.
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Yet time-saving technology does not automatically give people more freedom. When machines make tasks easier, society often responds by raising expectations. If everything becomes more efficient, the standard for what counts as “enough” may keep shifting farther out of reach.
With the advancement of technology, even if the end goal is a fairy-tale future where no one has to work and everyone spends life being entertained, we should ask whether that would truly satisfy us. A life of endless entertainment would probably become empty very quickly. Most people do not want to be passive spectators of their own lives. We want to be useful. We want dignity, relationships, creativity, rest, and meaning.
So perhaps the real goal is not a world without work, but a world where work supports life instead of swallowing it.
_Shuresh Ghimire., Ph.D., is an educator at the University of Connecticut._
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