Impact of AI on Work

Two years ago, ChatGPT burst onto the scene. Since then, there has been a lot of hype about ChatGPT and generative AI more broadly, as well as discussions surrounding how this technology will change work as we know it. One of the more surprising takes I’ve seen floating around is the idea that AI¹ will allow workers to work less by virtue of increasing productivity.

I think it’s pretty unlikely that this is going to come to pass. Historically, new technology has not resulted in reduced working hours. Take this 1990 ad for Microsoft Excel. In the ad, the workers are amazed by the autofill and formatting capabilities of the software, reducing what might have been an hour-long task into something that could be done in 5 minutes. As we have the benefit of living in the future (relative to 1990), we can see today that the impact of Excel is not that workers can now work 5 minutes on a task and rest for the remaining 55 minutes. Instead, our collective expectations simply changed, so that we all recognize now that making such a table should be a 5-minute task. We don’t spend the remaining 55 minutes on leisure; we just spend it on other work tasks, which translates into higher labor productivity.

Although it has yet to be determined all the ways in which AI is going to transform the work environment,² for me, AI has been Excel-like so far in the sense that I mainly use it as a tool to help accelerate certain tasks. For instance, while writing papers this month, I learned that I could use it to generate and format LaTeX tables from a screenshot of a table, which is an otherwise time-consuming and tedious task.

So like technologies before it, while AI may change the nature of what we do at work, I do not think it is going to change how much we work. If we consider the history of labor, and how minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and child labor laws came about, I think it becomes clear that this is more of a social and political question, rather than a technological one.