Time Doesn’t Trickle Down Either - by Katie Jagielnicka

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Time Doesn’t Trickle Down Either<br>Why labour-saving technology, including AI, mostly fails to give us our time back

Katie Jagielnicka<br>Jul 10, 2026

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Image licensed from Adobe Stock.<br>The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee! Thank you!

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Once upon a time, scribes spent hours crafting a single letter or other short document — preparing parchment, planning the layout, mixing ink, and then, finally, with quills in hand, committing the final strokes.1<br>If you couldn’t write yourself, or preferred not to, you also had to make the journey to a scribe and let them sweat over it on your behalf.<br>Then came cheap paper, rising literacy, and, in the nineteenth century, the fountain pen and the mighty typewriter. Writing a message no longer took several hours or days, but an hour or two. Fast forward to the digital age, and it takes mere minutes. With AI autocomplete and other tools, even seconds. But just as the time needed to write a message shrank, the volume of communication exploded. Typewriters both made writing faster and fuelled demand for a new clerical role: secretarial work. Instead of offices producing the same amount of correspondence and giving workers more free afternoons, they simply wrote much more—and hired people, mostly women, to manage the ever-growing pile of paperwork.2<br>Every new wave of technological innovation might arrive with the promise of less drudgery and more free time. Typewriters promised it well over a century ago. And so did washing machines. And vacuum cleaners. And personal computers. And now AI. Yet the long-promised golden age of leisure never seems to arrive, does it?

AI makes promises that are even grander than those of any technology before it. Techno-optimists insist it will soon ‘do everything,’ ushering in an age of abundance where we’ll all be healthier, smarter, and blessed with longer, more fulfilling lives spent entirely on pursuits of our choosing.<br>But this vision of utopia falls short when compared to reality. In a recent eight-month ethnographic study, researchers at UC Berkeley observed and interviewed employees at a 200-person technology company with broad access to generative AI tools. And they found that these tools did free up some time — only for that time to be quickly swallowed up by taking on more work. As one of the researchers, Xingqi Maggie Ye, observes:<br>They [employees] would run AI processes in the background while reviewing code, drafting documents, or attending meetings. Some even ran multiple AI agents simultaneously. This created a rhythm where both the human and the machine were constantly in motion.

In the interviews, the employees described feeling more capable after AI entered the picture —  but also busier, more stretched, and less able to properly disconnect from work. Ye and her co-researcher, Aruna Ranganathan, argue that this can create a vicious cycle: the initial productivity boost eventually becomes the new normal. And as expectations rise to match workers’ expanded capacity, the job becomes denser, more demanding, and ultimately harder to sustain, not less.<br>A similar finding was reported in a 2025 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Analysing data from the American Time Use Survey between 2004 and 2023, the researchers found that workers in occupations with greater exposure to generative AI experienced significant increases in working hours alongside corresponding declines in leisure time. Between 2023 and 2024, moving from relatively low to relatively high AI exposure (from the 25th to the 75th percentile) was associated with an additional 3.4 hours of work per week and 3.7 fewer hours of leisure. Exposure to AI-powered workplace surveillance was linked to longer working hours as well.<br>Meanwhile, overall job satisfaction and work-life balance among AI-exposed workers — though measured using different data3 — declined during the same period. Coincidence?<br>In their paper, the researchers suggest that the reason technology-enabled productivity gains slip through our fingers and, paradoxically, can end up making us work more is that the benefits tend to be captured by employers or consumers rather than workers themselves. As they conclude:<br>Our analysis reveals a consistent pattern: workers in occupations with higher AI exposure end up working longer hours and enjoying less leisure time. This effect is particularly pronounced in contexts where AI significantly enhances marginal productivity and monitoring efficiency. It is further amplified in competitive labor and product markets, where workers’...