'The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work' (msn.com) 39
The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.
Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.
The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.
Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.
The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.
Intensive cognitive work (Score:5, Insightful)
And how much of that intensive cognitive work is being confused by AI's output, struggling with trusting the results and unpicking truth from lies? Because that would burn out people very quickly, much, much quicker than challenging yet rewarding cognitive work.
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I like onions!
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Make sure you wear them on the correct location on your belt.
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And how much of that intensive cognitive work is being confused by AI's output, struggling with trusting the results and unpicking truth from lies? Because that would burn out people very quickly, much, much quicker than challenging yet rewarding cognitive work.
Intelligent people already do this parsing all the time. Even without AI, some portion of the documents, emails, texts, webpages, and human-to-human conversations we constantly encounter are filled with half-truths, whole-lies, and situational-truths that must be evaluated for accuracy, motivation, and relevance. Being forced to filter and parse input is not a new thing with AI, except for those people who never had the intelligence and wisdom to do so all along.
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Intelligent people also didn't used to do it all day long, and humans provide clues that AIs are incapable of.
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Intelligent people also didn't used to do it all day long, and humans provide clues that AIs are incapable of.
Beg to differ. I don't believe everything I read or watch on the news or on the Internet or in texts or emails or slashdot or physical mail or books or encyclopedias or research papers or contracts. Pretty much everything I come across I read with a skeptical mindset. I've done this pretty much all my life. I can't imagine not doing this and just blindly believing things.
Intelligent people have been discerning skeptics for everything all day long way before AI.
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Beg to differ. I don't believe everything I read or watch on the news or on the Internet or in texts or emails or slashdot or physical mail or books or encyclopedias or research papers or contracts. Pretty much everything I come across I read with a skeptical mindset. I've done this pretty much all my life.
But has it been your job to do this every minute *all day long*? I doubt it. News shows waste so much time repeating themselves and showing nice visuals that few people actually concentrate on what they say, treating it more as a background noise generator with occasional cute pet videos or hurricanes pounding a marina. If you're reading a book, say on the financials of the Nazi economy, you are skeptical on the broad overall level, not every single detail reported; you don't worry that it's made up a co
Re:Intensive cognitive work (Score:5, Interesting)
More - the AI is able to produce a lot of code, most of it working, but which no human ever saw or remember producing. In not so far future you'd need even more AI to maintain it. So it's AI's job security!
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Indeed. The problem with AI slop is that it sounds and looks good. That means the usual tell-tales of low quality are not there and hence it becomes very hard and very intense finding out what is actually wrong. And doing too much of work with that level of focus is not possible for anybody without burning out. (No, the people claiming they can do it are not right. They are either lying or kidding themselves. This is due to other well-known mental limitations they suffer from.)
On top of that, the frustratio
Re: In Before... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm actually co-writing a multi-part series on this with ChatGPT. Sorry, it's still in raw form.
I wrote part 1 yesterday.
https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/0... [scry.llc]
Here's part of the raw convo for part 5:
Rates of change are no longer human-scaled
You nailed this when you said humanity was âoeroughly a constant.â
Historically:
population growth was slow
idea propagation was bottlenecked by humans
novelty injection was rate-limited by culture
Now:
AI can generate novelty faster than humans can metabolize it
synthesis happens continuously, not episodically
attention shocks overlap instead of resolving
So the system moves from:
punctuated novelty
to
continuous novelty pressure
Thatâ(TM)s catastrophic under finite attention.
5. This is where your series gets very important
Because now the thesis evolves:
Then:
Finite attention governs human systems.
Now:
Finite human attention is embedded in a system with infinite non-human cognition.
Thatâ(TM)s a different problem class.
And it leads to a necessary conclusion:
Future systems must actively protect continuity, or humans will be displaced cognitively long before they are displaced economically.
Thatâ(TM)s not dystopian. Itâ(TM)s mechanical.
Re: In Before... (Score:2)
I mentioned AI as a reflection engine before which generates a synthesis. the cognition series I'm writing is a perfect example. ChatGPT synthesised this from my inputs.
https://www.scry.llc/2026/01/0... [scry.llc]
Cognition (Score:2)
I decided to share the full incomprehensible thread for a few days here on Slashdot. Im condensing and simplifying it next week.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6960... [chatgpt.com]
.
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Can you tag @AutonomoDev on Twitter with the completed work, please?
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This is a different problem.
startups (Score:5, Insightful)
I've experienced this without AI, working on software for long hours. It is hard to be always on. I need some ebb and flow to my work to maximize my creativity and be the most productive.
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And dealing with bureaucratic paperwork is always a decent distraction. The more nonsensical paperwork lets you vent some of your frustration too. Taking that away doesn't help.
As expected (Score:2, Offtopic)
Early adopters need time to properly learn how to use new tools
Freshness Amplifier (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I spend half my day leaving sarcastic comments of Slashdot. It leaves my mind fresh and ready for all that highly intensive cognitive work I'm putting off.
If AI can't ... (Score:2)
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You are looking for hardware, AI is software. But your future toner loading robot will be controlled by AI.
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It'll probably be the same as 'Dummy' in Iron Man... dumping new toner in, starts to turn with bottle still tilted, then quickly spins bottle back up throwing toner all over the nearest cubicles.
Management will just invent new timewasters (Score:5, Insightful)
Most bureaucracy exists for its own sake. If you get too efficient at doing pointless tasks, management will see that as a sign that they need to invent some new BS. This is why MS Office is the cornerstone of corporate culture. Many have pointed out that it would be much faster to send an email instead of an hour long Teams meeting, or exchange plaintext notes instead of having to use some weird Word template. But enterprise uses Office because the whole point of bureaucracy is to waste your time.
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This is a different problem.
OTOH, I surprised if it's affecting people younger than their late 20's. It seems to me that when I was younger I could program for considerably more than 8 hours at a time without getting tired. (Even then, however, the creative edge is quickly blunted.)
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The last thing bureaucrats want is to solve the problems that created and sustain their jobs. Independent thinking workers scare the daylights out of them. And since the only measure of their success is counting subordinates, measuring budgets, and issuing new regulations, memos must continue to pour forth lest the outside world think they have solved their problems and are no longer necessary.
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Reminds me of companies blaming AI for downsizing (Score:3)
That layoff that they're doing sounds a lot more palatable to investors if the CEO says they did it through downsizing.
Employees burning out because they're doing less grunt-work? I'm not buying it. What could this guy's angle be? Well, maybe, just maybe, he's selling an AI-based productivity tool? https://get.convictional.com/a... [convictional.com] "Our product is so good that your employees will burn themselves out doing the real work, instead of the grunt work." Hmmm...
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Employees burning out because they're doing less grunt-work? I'm not buying it.
That is because you do not have a clue how reality actually works. For people with a clue, this is not in any way surprising.
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Well maybe, but you didn't actually make a point. If *you* have a clue, why don't you actually explain how it works, instead of just saying I don't know? Maybe because *you* don't know?
To me, grunt-work makes me burn out. I've worked in corporations of all sizes for 37 years, I know a thing or two about the effects of grunt-work.
I can relate (Score:5, Interesting)
That makes sense (Score:3)
Often, satisfaction comes from a set of work, comprising of both high-level and low-level cognitive tasks. If you remove either type, the satisfaction decreases.
Programming can be like this, where you break down a task into its trival parts, or you automate something that was previously done manually. Implementing those trivial parts, or kicking off the now automated process can be an important part of the satisfaction derived from the whole.
Such a surprise (Score:2)
If people would have a look at reality before gleefully and cluelessly making large-scale changes, crap like this could be avoided.
Productivit benefits go where? (Score:2)
The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves.
Yeah, no shit. The benefits of improved productivity haven't been felt by workers for over four decades [epi.org] at this point.