AI is making us work more

Tawanda Munongo | tawandamunongo.dev | Oct 21, 2025

From lamps to lightbulbs, and now with LLMs, certain human advancements have had the capacity to transform the nature of work. This transformation comes in the form of leverage, allowing us to do more, to transcend limitations, and manifest more than we ever could. In the case of the aforementioned illumination technologies, people who had to set their tools down at sundown because it was now too dark to work could now go on well into the night.

And, with that came a subtle shift as “can work” transformed into “should work”. Such is the nature of advancement - recently acquired luxuries quickly transform into necessities, and pushing our newfound capabilities to their limits becomes an expectation.

With this, the 996 culture re-emerges, not because someone imposed it but because the tools themselves, and the culture surrounding them, make rest feel like lost potential

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.” - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Book by Yuval Noah Harari

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Tools don’t demand work; people and systems do. The machine doesn’t care whether or not you sleep. What keeps us awake are the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be “productive”.

Qualities Without Men

Alexander Stern | Commonweal Magazine | Nov 15, 2025

>The liberalization of politics and culture, together with the possibilities for work and leisure opened up by new technologies, have greatly expanded individual rights and freedoms. At the same time, though, the scope of private life itself seems to be shrinking. Our experiences are flattened by the mass culture that everyone consumes, regurgitates, remixes (and that AI is now beginning to remix for us). Social science and marketing—combined with coercive technology—turn what seem, from the first-person perspective, like deeply personal choices into statistically predictable and controllable behaviors.

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Globalization is just one of four drivers of the deculturation that Roy traces back sixty years. The others are neoliberal financialization, the internet revolution, and the “individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s.” All of these developments tend, for Roy, toward a leveling that both tears up roots—denying the relevance of history and tradition—and cuts down references to transcendent value above. Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form (consider the difference between friendship and Facebook friendship); and hedonic individualism flattens identity into desire. The result is human societies that exist more and more on a banal, sanitized, and explicitly coded middle tier, without depths to plumb or heights to scale.