AI Hasn't Made People More Efficient—It's Just Made Everyone Busier: The Red Queen Effect

Lately a lot of people have had a rather contradictory feeling: AI tools keep getting more powerful, yet life doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier.

Writing a document used to take, say, half a day; now AI can generate a draft in a matter of seconds. On the surface, things really are faster.

The Real Work Is Only Just Beginning

But anyone who’s actually done it knows: the moment the draft pops out is the moment the real work is only just beginning—revising, adding material, checking for errors, rewriting the logic, and then confirming it one more time. After a whole day of toil, you often find that you spent the entire day “reviewing drafts.”

And then something else quietly happens, too. Once everyone starts using AI, the standards get pulled up right along with it. Finishing one report a day used to be perfectly normal; now a thought pops into many people’s heads: “Couldn’t AI knock that out in a few minutes?”

And so efficiency rose, but expectations swelled right along with it.

That Line from the Red Queen

This reminds me of a line spoken by the Red Queen, from the pen of Lewis Carroll:

“You have to keep running just to stay in the same place.”

In the age of AI, a lot of people are actually standing on a treadmill that keeps speeding up. They sprint frantically just to avoid falling behind.

Are We Using Tools, or Helping Tools Speed Up the World?

Technology has indeed brought efficiency. But if the time we save ends up merely traded for more work and higher expectations, then sometimes you really can’t help but ask a question:

Are we actually using tools, or are we helping the tools speed up this world?