While conducting research on how AI was changing daily work at a U.S. technology company, UC Berkeley Haas doctoral student Xingqi Maggie Ye noticed a pattern that raised a provocative question: What if AI is intensifying work rather than reducing it? Ye’s eight-month ethnographic study, co-authored by Associate Professor Aruna Ranganathan and featured in Harvard […]
I wish I remembered where I read this, but a while back I heard a hypothesis about a similar idea to this article: basically that humans only have a certain amount of high cognition tasks in them in a given day, no matter how much time we have. Basically, those low effort rote tasks that take up a lot of the day are less taxing than more complex tasks.
The idea was that even if AI reduces these kinds of tasks, that doesn’t actually mean we can fit more complex tasks in their place without burning out.
I wish I remembered where I read this, but a while back I heard a hypothesis about a similar idea to this article: basically that humans only have a certain amount of high cognition tasks in them in a given day, no matter how much time we have. Basically, those low effort rote tasks that take up a lot of the day are less taxing than more complex tasks.
The idea was that even if AI reduces these kinds of tasks, that doesn’t actually mean we can fit more complex tasks in their place without burning out.
This research seems to support that idea.
Decision fatigue