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As AI continues to enable smarter tasks, change processes and make work more efficient, the technology industry narrative remains that AI will make our lives easier and more hassle free. However, will AI ever actually allow us to work less?
I was one of a few professionals asked about AI’s impact on work and working hours by Fast Company Middle East recently. As a marketer and a content producer, I use Generative AI day-to-day for research, planning, writing drafts, editing, formatting HTML, image and video editing, content production and other things. Although GenAI saves me time per task, it also enables me to do more and different tasks, so I’m still working as hard as ever.
Technology has always worked this way.
Until the arrival of the desktop computer and word processing software, offices used typewriters to produce correspondence, reports and other documents. Being rather unforgiving when it came to mistakes, typewriters were normally used by typists and secretaries who had good typing skills and would make few mistakes. Due to difficulty of use, limited formats and a limited number of typists, correspondence and paper reports were also limited.
With the arrival of personal computers with word processing packages and desktop printers, creating documents was made faster and easier. They made a laborious process so easy that anyone could do it, because typing mistakes were easy to correct. They also made it easier to create different print layouts and print on different sizes of paper.
PCs and word processors saved time in preparing documents and, in theory, saved paper because typing mistakes could be fixed before printing.. But what happened? Word processing allowed us to create a greater variety of documents more easily, which led to an increased demand for them. The amount of paper wasted on inter-office memos during the 80s and 90s just doesn’t bear thinking about! Rather than reduce the amount of time spent by office workers in creating documents, time spent n typing went up exponentially.
There are parallels between the arrival of the PC and the arrival of GenAI. It’s become a competitive advantage, because GenAI can help fast-track some kinds of task, but I feel very few of us are going to have more time to put our feet up as a result.
You can read May El Habachi’s full article in Fast Company Middle East here:
by Carrington Malin
Carrington Malin is a UAE-based marketing and communications professional, consultant, entrepreneur and writer with many years experience of building brands, driving growth and leading high-performance teams. He has worked with a wide range of high-growth, technology and tech-driven ventures across ecommerce, consumer products, digital services, B2B, media, software, hardware and other sectors. These days he focuses mainly on emerging technology ventures related to artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR), blockchain, drones, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics and smart cities.