🧠 Your AI Productivity Gains Are Unhealthy

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 🏭Origins of Optimization

• 🧀The AI Efficiency Trap?

• 🦾Can AI Optimizes Your Rest?!

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Machine Learning (ML): Leverages data to recognize patterns and make predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so.

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): A measurable value that tracks progress toward a specific objective. For example, steps walked per day to reach a daily fitness goal.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

You’re sitting in a café that smells of faintly burnt espresso, with the soft clatter of cups echoing among the tables. As you wait for your friend, you notice a stranger’s face is washed in the screen’s glow, his fingers tapping restlessly across the keyboard.

Even the décor seems to participate. A wall of weathered wood bears an oversized quote: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Beneath it, a bookshelf is arranged like a shrine to modern productivity, with rows featuring Atomic Habits, Deep Work, and Outliers.

A sudden buzz tickles your pocket. A famous financial influencer just posted: “Every hour you’re idle is money lost!” You weren’t trying to think about money, but now you are.

Everywhere you turn, life feels like an endless self-improvement game. The culture that underpins our society often dictates that if we’re not optimizing, we’re falling behind. You begin to wonder: “Where did this obsession come from? What happens when AI turbocharges it?”

🏭ORIGINS OF OPTIMIZATION

⦿ 1️⃣ From Industrial Society?

For most of human history, we experienced time organically. For instance, farmers worked with the rhythm of the seasons, and the day ended when the sun slipped below the horizon. But in the 1760s, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a major period of technological advancements that shifted societies toward machine-driven manufacturing, with massive factories staffed by thousands of employees. To manage this new way of work, employers needed a reliable method to measure and manage labor.

In the 1880s, American businessman Willard Bundy invented and patented a new mechanical time recorder, called the Time Clock. Soon, the International Time Recording Company (ITR) spread these new mechanical time recorders across industrial workplaces. They standardized the workday, making hourly wages the norm. The language of time became indistinguishable from the language of money.

In this new industrial society, being idle didn’t just mean leaving money on the table. It was seen as a moral failing. German sociologist Max Weber captured this shift in his description of the Protestant work ethic: the belief that diligent labor pleases God and builds spiritual character. As industrialization accelerated through the 1900s, Western society increasingly equated productivity with virtue and leisure with sin.

⦿ 2️⃣ Early Criticisms?

In 1958, American political philosopher Hannah Arendt published “The Human Condition,” warning that society was becoming “stuck in accelerating cycles of labor and consumption.” She called this mode of existence the Vita Activa: a life defined by labor and busyness. In contrast, she established the Vita Contemplativa: a life oriented toward contemplation and simply being.

In ancient societies, the Vita Contemplativa used to be the highest calling. Scholars were revered precisely because they prioritized contemplation over material output. But by the 20th century in America, worth was increasingly measured in units of output.

She argued that if we banish the reflective, relaxing forms of living, life loses depth. Under Vita Activa, life begins to feel like a checklist to complete. Instead of asking ourselves, “How did that experience make me feel?” we increasingly ask, “What did I accomplish?”

⦿ 3️⃣ Industrialization Survives Today?

Today, we’re measured in countless ways, and our choices are constantly quantified, whether it’s the KPIs tied to our quarterly targets or the step count displayed on our fitness watches. We inherited a belief that progress means constant improvement of efficiency, and that idle time is waste. The logic of industrialization survives in new software: produce, optimize, repeat. Now, AI functions as the ultimate enforcer, quantifying life itself in ways humans once never imagined.

🧀THE AI EFFICIENCY TRAP?

⦿ 4️⃣ AI = More Work?

In theory, integrating AI into daily workflows reduces busywork, freeing employees to tackle more complex projects if they wish. In practice, however, the opposite is often true: although over 75% of employees report using some form of AI at work, most feel more pressure to perform, not less.

Wharton scholar Dr. Cornelia C. Walther calls this the AI Efficiency Trap: when productivity tools create perpetual pressure to perform. As AI accelerates processes, employees are being asked to do more at a faster pace with fewer errors. In other words, performance standards keep climbing, leaving employees juggling greater responsibilities and higher expectations.

⦿ 5️⃣ AI’s Effect on Software Engineers at Amazon?

Since the First Industrial Revolution, workers have feared that machines would replace their skills and make their labor obsolete. However, when technology transformed industries like food processing and automobile manufacturing, it didn’t lead to massive job cuts. Instead, jobs were broken down into simpler, more repetitive steps.

For example, large assembly lines with specialized sections such as slicing, trimming, and packaging replaced skilled butchers in small meat shops. According to labor historian Jason Resnikoff, “the workers complained of speed-up, work intensification, and work degradation.” As AI continues to transform the labor force, it’s starting to have a similar effect on software engineers at Amazon by changing the quality of their work.

According to the Workforce Reporter Noam Scheiber, software engineers at Amazon have expressed that work has turned “more routine, less thoughtful, and, crucially, much faster-paced.” They even expressed a cultural shift happening within the e-commerce giant focused on integrating AI into everything. Amazon has raised output goals and become less forgiving about deadlines. Despite software engineering teams being roughly half the size they were last year, Amazon still expects them to produce roughly the same amount of code by leveraging AI.

🦾CAN AI OPTIMIZE YOUR REST?!

⦿ 6️⃣ Tracking How We Unwind?

When we come home from work, we should take time to unwind and recharge. But today, even recovery can be tracked and improved. This year, over 50 million Americans wore fitness watches every day, many of which generate daily recovery scores. So, what is a recovery score, and how is it calculated?

All fitness watches continuously capture Inputs: biometric data points like your Resting Heart Rate (RHR). Then, ML models link patterns of Inputs to likely Outputs (i.e., state of recovery). For example, if your RHR spikes above the normal range, your heart and lungs are still working hard to recover. As a result, your recovery score will be lower.

To improve that recovery score, you’re encouraged to adopt healthier habits: consistent bedtimes, fewer alcoholic beverages, and a more balanced daily diet. At the end of each month, the fitness watch tells you how these healthier habits improved your average recovery score. This form of feedback nudges you to keep optimizing.

There’s a clear upside: it makes you healthier. However, it also turns rest into a metric to maximize. If we aren’t improving, we’re falling behind the best version of ourselves.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

Technology magnifies the incentives we already live by. If those incentives worship optimization above all else, AI will accelerate us toward burnout, not liberation.

📒FINAL NOTE

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