the fast life is slowly killing us. ai seals the coffin.

the fast life is slowly killing us. ai seals the coffin.

the efficiency paradox of the Industrial Revolution is repeating itself in the age of AI, accelerating the hidden biological cost of a "fast life"

an essay by adelita

Human lives have been speeding up for centuries. As a result of the new labor demands of the Industrial Revolution, “the new means of production meant that the demise of earlier, slower modes of life”. Although new machinery set a “new, faster pace for labor” by multiplying the amount of human labor required for manufacturing, public memory still retains the black-and-white images of men, women, and children working in dirty, dangerous conditions for nearly all of their waking hours.  

In Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s book “More Work for Mother”, the author explains that although the advent of modern household appliances such as the dishwasher, the stove, the washing machine, the vacuum, and the microwave were advertised as tools to decrease household labor for women, the opposite became true. As the ability for output became more rapid, the demand for more output (faster) quickly became the new homemaker’s norm. No longer is the rate of 1 basket of laundry the standard for a day’s work in the home, for the ability to do 2 in the same time frame has shifted the expectation of daily labor output.  

Discussions surrounding AI’s implications often critique it for its environmental waste, the sudden economic shifts it causes, the future of human literacy/critical thinking, the sanctity of human-made art, its role in enhancing mass surveillance by state and private actors, and narrative formation and reinforcement on social media. The effects of AI on the concept of time as it relates to labor and “personal productivity” seem to be largely deprioritized from the conversation. This may be, in part, due to the urgency of the other effects of AI on people’s livelihood day-to-day (environmental destruction, declining literacy, and economic shifts being the most visible). However, it is important that we don’t lose sight of how AI’s widespread use is putting pressure on all of our lives to run faster — even for people who don’t use AI at all.

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Read the rest of the essay on my Substack - I hope you will subscribe :) SpaceHey will still be the place I post original poetry, but I'll do more prose over on the other site.