A UC Berkeley study spent eight months inside a real tech company watching how people actually used AI. The finding?

Workers worked more, not less.

They took on broader responsibilities, blurred the line between work and rest, and filled every freed-up minute with more tasks. Nobody told them to. The tools just made stopping feel like waste.

In this episode of In The Loop, I'm breaking down what the researchers actually found, why this pattern has repeated with every major labour-saving technology for the past century — from the washing machine to the spreadsheet to email — and what German sociologist Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration tells us about why productivity tools never seem to produce the spare time they promise.

The question AI is asking us right now isn't whether it works. It clearly does. It's whether we have the individual or collective will to decide what the time it saves is actually for.

Episode highlights

(01:20) – The Berkeley study: eight months, forty interviews, three patterns

(03:45) – Task expansion: why even product managers started writing code

(05:10) – Blurred boundaries and the frictionless prompt problem

(06:30) – Why self-regulation failed — and why it felt good

(08:00) – The washing machine, the spreadsheet, and a hundred years of the same story

(10:15) – Hartmut Rosa and the theory of social acceleration

(12:00) – Dynamic stabilisation: why the treadmill only gets faster

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Jack HoughtonLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-houghton1/TikTok - @jackschats

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