AI Is Making Us Work More

Summary

Intro I was listening, recently, to an episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast with Armin Ronacher, and something he said really resonated with me. He pointed out how paradoxical it is that AI was supposed to free us and allow us to work less yet, somehow, we find ourselves working more than ever before (timestamp). I have seen the same trend in my own work patterns. This increase in work is not necessarily in the sense of being busier because there's more work to do. Instead, it manifests as a psychological compulsion to keep going. The very existence of these hyper-capable tools seems to have created a new kind of pressure, an existential duty to keep working, to keep driving the machine that never sleeps. 996 in the Valley The 996 concept - working from 9AM to 9PM, six days a week - used to only be associated with Chinese tech companies, having been championed by the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma. The rest of the world, however, used to see it as nothing more than an extreme, sustainable model of hustle culture. In 2025, however, there have been several reports of this (toxic?) work culture migrating west. According to a recent Wired investigation, AI start-ups in Silicon Valley have begun to adopt 996-style work schedules. The rationalisation, of course, is "to stay competitive". Leaders at these companies believe that with things moving so fast, especially in the AI space, and with developers having access to tools that can keep going so long as there's a human there to steer them, people must worker harder to keep up with that. It has become not at all unusual to see job postings that make it clear to prospective hires that they should look forward to long, gruelling hours. When the machine never tires Throughout human history, the natural constraint on work was always human fatigue. We stopped working when we were tired. And, we took time to rest because our minds and bodies needed to recover. However, the introduction of generative AI and agents fundamentall...